Miuccia Prada has spent decades building an intellectual system around her brand. Her Autumn/Winter 2026 collection, presented alongside Raf Simons at the Fondazione Prada, is perhaps the most literal demonstration of that intricate vision: a show of 60 looks built from just 15 models, each appearing four times in versions progressively stripped of the look before. A simple idea that results in an absolute stroke of runway genius.
The set, always slightly deceptive in Prada's case, was a stripped-out building, with ornamental mouldings, colonial windows and marble fireplaces still fixed to the exterior walls. Inherited from the set built for the previous month's menswear show, furniture and paintings spanning five different centuries appeared throughout. From set to collection, everything unfolds in layers, of culture and history, functioning as a direct extension of what happens within the Pradasphere.
Each model's first pass showed the look in its fullest version: long, tubular coats, raincoats with fragments that peel away to reveal houndstooth beneath, as well as utility-style jackets in glossy cotton with strips of fur along the lapels. After the first pass of all 15 models, the coat disappeared on the second.
On the third, a flared 1950s dress appeared that no one had seen until that point, hidden beneath the earlier layers. On the fourth, a knit T-shirt and drawstring shorts. Bella Hadid, making her first appearance on a Prada runway, made that full journey wearing the same micro-floral embroidered tights and the same purple Prada kitten heels throughout.
The embellishments in this collection work almost like a geode. Aged satin embroidery appears alongside fabrics deliberately faded as though bleached by the sun. Archive dresses resurface, repurposed as though they were memories trapped inside more recent garments. Simons explained it to WWD: there is no hierarchy between the minimal and the opulent, between the pristine and the worn.
Miuccia Prada spoke of the complexity of layers, present in feeling, in politics, in life, and reflected in clothing. The constant need to change, to adapt, to move from public to private, from coat to dress, from dress to T-shirt.
Each model in the show was four different women, or the same woman at four very different moments of her day. The cast of just 15 faces, muses including Julia Nobis, Amanda Murphy and Hadid herself, reinforced that vision: there is no single Prada woman, there are pluralities. And each of them, as the show notes put it, contains multitudes.
