IT’S BEEN three decades since Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller’s Hackers introduced a generation to the aesthetic semantics of the cyberpunk underground. Shortly after The Matrix came, seeding a dot-com neurosis into the cultural imagination and corresponding wardrobes, one built on elongated silhouettes, deliberate clashes of material and utility, and the idea that clothing could function as both armour and provocation. Debates and risks around artificial intelligence seem to be bringing these sensibilities back, and Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons want to plug it back into our veins.

Prada’s design ethos has always been one of self-awareness. Of its capacity to divide opinion more cleanly than a knife but also of its own paradigms and innate paradoxes. Few other brands self-reference to the degree that Prada does, repeatedly unpicking the details that build the structure of clothing. The Spring/Summer 2027 menswear collection continues to prod at the edges of one of clothing’s key principles: fit.

Consider it a visual stimulus – the eye can’t escape it, but it also can’t make sense of it. In fact, Prada’s long-running preoccupation with fit and productive discomfort, taken to a point where the disagreement between garment and eye becomes the entire conversation, arguably has its own verb: Pradamaxxing.

The collection opened on a white denim jacket cropped above the hip, paired with slim white trousers and an oversized black blazer, establishing a template of deliberate proportional mischief that held for the duration. Broad-shouldered single-breasted tailored jackets appeared throughout, their volume at the shoulder in direct conversation with the narrowness below. Peter Pan collar coats sat alongside bomber-style leather jackets and cropped sweater vests.

V-necks, a staple of the professorial Prada wardrobe, were cut so low they sank almost to the navel. Wide, weathered leather belts anchored looks that might otherwise have read as wilfully untethered. The Perspex flooring of the Fondazione, illuminated from beneath by cool halogen light, gave the whole procession the quality of something being examined under glass. Which, in a sense, we are post show.

The actual line-up of clothes was deliberately mundane in its DNA. What Prada and Simons did was strip each one of extraneous detail and rebuild it within a controlled, bleak silhouette that made the familiar feel alien and new. Jeans appeared in berry, pink, brown, white and yellow, printed with geometric Gio Ponti-ish patterns, cut in leather with the same rocky five-pocket fit, and in tailoring fabrics including houndstooth and Prince of Wales check. The most arresting version arrived in nylon organza, translucent enough to expose the full architecture of the garment underneath. Good taste has always been subjective topic at Prada and it is good to see it remains so.

Silhouettes were slim to the point of elongation, creating something closer to an anime figure than a conventional runway model. Jackets cropped just above the hip. Trousers cut low, waistbands sitting where they perhaps shouldn’t. The two elements approach each other without quite meeting, a gap that recalls the space between a reaching Adam and his God in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam – so close yet so far. And the desire to draw the two together…

Accessories followed the same thinking. Asymmetrical sunglasses combined colours and silhouettes from entirely different frames and worn by models in their best Ziggy Stardust era. Bowie would loved it. And probably worn most of it, particularly the patterned silk scarves slashed around the hips.

Underneath the obvious provocation – and there will be plenty of eyes who do disagree with the clothing – the collection carried a straightforward argument: these are clothes to be worn, taken apart, and reassembled according to the logic of the person wearing them. The title, Clarity, might initially read as a descriptor for the stripped-back approach. It functions more accurately as a method. “Everything looks simple, but it is not,” Prada noted. “The new silhouette is fundamental. There was something compelling about reiteration, about this focus. It is about being extremely decisive, and precise.”

“The ambition was to do something new with nothing,” she added. “Against exaggeration, against complex material. Against useless design.”

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