Prada 2015 S/S MILAN Fashion Week Collection

 AMO, the company that designs the sets for Prada’s shows, has created some special effects in the past. In June, the show space was transformed into a huge swimming pool as a backdrop for the Spring menswear collection. Today, the women’s turn, the expanse of water had been replaced by eerie dunes made of lilac sand. Limpid water to dry sand-a process suggestive of catastrophe.

There were other clues. The collections shared certain characteristics-a lot of topstitching, a lot of coats-but Miuccia Prada‘s menswear show settled for conservatism to the point where it was singled out as emblematic of normcore. And Mrs. P wasn’t going to like that much. So if at first glance her new women’s looks were still bourgeois-proper-A-line coats with three-quarter sleeves, belted coatdresses, shapely skirts to the knee paired with little sweaters, all things she’s done before-that late "normality" had actually been unhinged, perhaps by the disaster that turned water to sand. It’s the kind of willful twist she pulls off better than anyone else.

"I wanted to revive the beauty of incredible fabrics," said Miuccia, but almost in the next breath, she revealed how conflicted her relationship with beauty is. For the umpteenth time, she said beauty was "an impossibility." And, yet again, she showed how a seductive new kind of dark beauty could be literally pieced together from ingredients as unpromising as scraps of brocade and raw cotton. Maybe that’s what she meant when she talked about "a confrontation with antiquity," in which the old would be made new. And you could really see the make of these clothes.

And though it might have been a little bit due to Frédéric Sanchez’s extraordinary electric firestorm of a soundtrack-which closed with an ardent exhortation to "kiss me, kiss me, kiss me"-in the end you could really feel their passion, too.