045: An Ugly Dress

A Prada dress that asks, "What is sexy?"

“What an ugly dress,” I thought to myself as I pulled it out of the packaging it had arrived in, having not noticed the excessively ruffled balconette bust when I purchased the dress, camouflaged by its busy print.

Since the onset of puberty, I had actively resisted bras that promised lifts, plunges and enhancements in size. Having made it through that tempestuous time of teenhood not remotely well-endowed, this was a small part of myself I had embraced, was wholly comfortable with, even bragged about. This liberated me in terms of what I could wear up top; nothing I wore would ever draw much attention to my chest, or so I thought. The bust of this dress is not unlike a “naughty maid” costume one might find at a Halloween shop, ever so repulsive. I was unsure of immediately returning it to the secondhand haunt I’d bought it from, in the event that the Prada Effect should take hold.

The Prada Effect is the reengineering of our minds to see that what is ugly can be beautiful, if not more. It is good sense and seeing things differently, pushing against the limitations of our worldview and investigating why we had ever thought otherwise. For quite some time, I did not like the fall 2010 collection at all, so radically different from the white hot Lolitas of the preceding spring show. If spring was the season of the reckless kid sister on a beach holiday, all micro shorts, babydoll tops and pouty red lacquered lips, fall was about her stern, horn-rimmed glasses-wearing librarian big sister. But when the dress presented itself to me, I went for it. Let’s call it exposure therapy.

According to the laws of conventional sexiness and beauty, this collection is an outlaw. In her review of the show, critic Cathy Horyn wrote, “Miuccia Prada’s fall collection tonight dealt with women oblivious of fads, brands, red carpets and warnings about taking the extra helping.” For the Ozempic devotee, it is a nightmare: chunky cable-knit sweater sets, full-bodied A-line skirts and dresses, frilly busts, thick socks and tights that daren’t expose a shadow of skin, the button fronts of dresses buttoned to the very top. Virtually everything is left to the imagination, the antithesis of a society steeped in overexposure and virtual unreality.

The more I thought of it, I understood that there is something extremely alluring in the not knowing, particularly in such front-facing times. What we choose to wear not only reveals our interiority, but can conceal it too. How thrilling it is to imagine a deviant masquerading as a prude and the slow process of uncovering their layers! With each look, Miuccia Prada explored how, in the time of “boys will be boys” – the fifties, sixties, and quite frankly, even applicable now – what it is to be a sharp and unrelenting woman. So deferential the references are to a bygone era that it verges on camp. Journalist Susannah Frankel writes in Prada Catwalk, “The look was bourgeois, for sure, but exaggerated, humorous even: imagine a super-charged, sexy secretary.” A secretary who is unafraid to strike the roving hands of the resident office pervert with a steel ruler at their approach. This collection also had the spirit of Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s “The Lovers”, serene with anguish and fury, dressed to never betray her emotions, or Tippi Hedren in Marnie, with her sky-high beehive and her buttoned-up unraveling, you never know what, or who, you’re going to get.

Miuccia Prada is brilliant at creating collections that provoke and challenge us to confront ourselves with regard to how we define youth, beauty, and sex. I’ve never been one to think of myself as particularly sexy, but this dress makes me feel positively hot, every bit the vixen. This comes as a surprise to me each time I wear it; clearly there are plenty of layers I’ve yet to even reveal to myself.

Please enjoy this clip of Katie Grand’s opinion of Fall 2010