Fashion - An apron for a new age

Suzy Menkes

Why aprons? Why a symbol of women tied to the kitchen? Why now - when the return of the power woman has been a constant theme of the summer 2009 season? "I like them," Miuccia Prada said disingenuously of the mini pinafores of pleats wrapped around dresses. They mixed matte and shiny fabrics, with the first outfits in rough Hessian material, artistically torn as if the designer were looking at traditional shepherds in the fields.
Who knows the complex thoughts of Prada? Her Miu Miu presentation, which closed the international season, seemed like a metaphor for fashion now: individual, interesting and filled with oblique and obscure references. (Miu Miu's were Greco-Roman mosaic prints that produced a pixilated pattern.)
But on a lighter level, this Miu Miu show had appealing clothes and was different from both the sports scenario of last season, which has brought mesh and perforation into fashion; or the Prada show, with its crinkled, homespun fabrics.
The tailored dresses, with feminine shoes, some with a bow at the back of the heel, won the approval of Kate Bosworth, sitting front row along with Kirsten Dunst, while Miu Miu celebrities from advertising campaigns were projected on the walls of the gilded mansion.
The show was quintessentially Prada, ladylike with a hint of subversion, and clean and geometric in the graphic dresses with their additions of sharp pleats. Although it seemed an unlikely choice, perhaps the sack-like burlap fabric will have the same resonance as Prada's current guipure lace. And in one way, Miu Miu matched Prada: another model fell off her pin-heeled shoes.