Here’s Who Won Milan Fashion Week

We had just seen a collection seemingly shaped by this very process. The Fondazione Prada set was a small white “hut” on stilts connected to a long, winding runway, the kind of thing you might imagine in a hazily constructed memory. And in a weird way, the clothes felt like a Prada collection you might imagine if you were trying to remember what a Prada collection looks like. There were Prada’s hallmark tiny sweaters, and trousers that sit low on the hips and long through the ankle, but things got blurry from there. What looked like heavy wool trousers were actually made of cotton and printed with trompe-loeil patterns, affixed with make-believe belts. Shirts appeared frozen in motion thanks to internal wire, and colorful layered sweaters were in fact one single knit. Trench coats and military jackets were cut many sizes too small in the sleeves, as if they were “from mom, from dad, from grandmother, from grandfather, maybe things from your memories,” Simons said.

The abrupt outerwear looked immediately wearable, among many other pieces from a collection full of intrigue, one that invited you to reconsider first impressions. The designer mirrored the irrationality of the world through deceptive clothing that can’t easily be explained, even by its own creators. Said Mrs. Prada of the way they work: “I like this, I like this. And we just put things together in a very simplistic, very naive way,”

But the real winner of Milan Fashion Week in my book was Jonathan Anderson, whose incredible JW Anderson collection ping-ponged between the absurdly imaginative and the transfixingly wearable. The best JWA collections feel like windows into the designer’s brain, where he catches fragments of ideas and then explores them to their fullest conceptual potential. Backstage, he said he had been trying hypnotherapy sleep apps for the past six months, one of which taught him the term “real sleep.” “I was wondering what that meant, really?” he said. “Today, do we actually sleep at all?”

A night owl, Anderson’s fantasy of a good night’s sleep looks like pillowy duvet coats, knit pajama tops, and v-neck sweaters with the lacey necklines of fine nighties. Instead of counting sheep, Anderson was perhaps counting trios of cocoon-like leather coats and enormous knit bomber jackets. Anderson sounded more determined than ever to push his shapes to absurd proportions: “I went to a music festival recently, and I saw people dressing more in high fashion than actually is happening in fashion,” he said. His mind wandered from there. Georgian country cottages became hand-knit cardi-jackets; the abstract notion of scale became a hilariously huge green tie; strips of cashmere fabric adorned protruding structures that hung from the waist. Finally, he thought back to the nightcap that sent him spinning to bed: Guinness! The audience couldn’t help but grin at the three beer-branded knits that brought the show home.

In tradition-bound Milan, this fast-paced mirror of Anderson’s imaginative creative psyche was extra gratifying, exactly the kind of lighthearted drama Milan Fashion Week needed.