Prada Puts the Skirt First in Milan, and Piedmont's Mills Take Note

Miuccia Prada opened her Milan Fashion Week show with a proposition the Guardian described as deceptively simple: begin with a great skirt. The paper noted that her personal uniform — a knee-length A-line or pleated skirt, most often worn with a plain sweater and kitten heels — shaped a collection that gave skirts star billing while swerving the trousers and dresses the season might have expected. The Guardian framed the result as another success for the pairing of Prada with the Belgian designer Raf Simons, a combination it said had once again spun gold for the fashion house.

Milan Fashion Week is the moment each season when the international press reads Italy through its clothes, and this season the reading is about construction rather than spectacle. A collection built on skirts and tailoring is a collection built on fabric, cut and finishing — the unglamorous middle of the supply chain. That is the part of Italian fashion that lives outside the show tents, in the mills and workshops of the country's north.

The Guardian's account is a fashion review, not an economic report, and it makes no claim about production or employment. But the emphasis it identifies — a house returning to the skirt as its organising idea — is the kind of signal that the textile trade watches, because the mills that weave for the big houses plan their looms around exactly this sort of shift.