Prada’s Spring 2026 collection exists outside the box

Titled “Body of Composition,” Prada’s Spring 2026 collection featured adaptable, contemporary pieces that refuse to be put in boxes.

Miuccia Prada has always believed that if there’s anything fashion should be, it’s that it must be versatile. It should “help you express what’s inside your head,” she said in a 2007 interview with Wall Street Journal. “And you have many different things in your head—a relationship with a man, with society. Sometimes you want to appear powerful, or serious or rich. All of us want to represent something.”

For Spring 2026, the designer of the eponymous Italian fashion brand once again gave a masterclass on the true definition of fashion with a collection that invites freedom into what we wear. Titled “Body of Composition,” the collection was crafted by Miuccia with her co-creative director Raf Simons and featured adaptable, contemporary pieces that refuse to be put in boxes.

Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection is all about refining and warping familiar clothes into those that have boundless new meaning. The result are pieces that are limitless in how they are worn and interpreted. “This collection is about reacting to the uncertain—clothes that can shift, change, adapt. In the combination of different elements, in this idea of composition, there is a choice and a freedom, authority, and agency for the woman wearing them,” Miuccia wrote in her show notes.

Freedom and flexibility were reflected not only in the clothes that were mainly logo-less, but also in the runway at Prada’s Deposito Fondazione. Miuccia and Raf always held their shows there, and would enliven the cavernous space with built-out sets that include waterfalls or a maze of scaffolding. For this year’s Milan Fashion Week, the duo stripped down the middle of the venue and dressed it up with lacquer in the label’s signature orange. The show seats, according to Harper Bazaar, were arranged in four simple stadium tiers lining the walls.

Bold and vibrant military-style “Prada uniform” opened the runway and reigned supreme throughout the show. The utilitarian suits are an ode to Miuccia’s long history of creating uniform-style clothing for creatively-driven women. It features ensembles, such as a short-sleeve military shirts were paired with pleated trousers or skirts and elbow-length gloves, that “occupy the same position as evening dress,” the label wrote on Instagram. They were “combined atypically with notions of the typically feminine in recompositions of a new elegance.”

The collection continued to blur the lines between chic and utilitarian, with bra tops that were reduced to bits of chiffon, as well as sheer tubes and skirts held up by suspenders. Skirt silhouettes came in pencil or kilt variations, and as lace jumbled together. Some were wrapped around the waist with a thick black ribbon, while other were given a balloon shape, turning straight-cut tunics into glamorous cocktail dresses.

Overblown dresses stole the show, with some made even more elegant wth scrunched-up opera gloves and bejeweled collars. Preppy polo shirts came with supersized chest emblems, stiffened into voluminous coats, or softened into cardigans. Many of these shirts were paired with little bum shorts or pointed-toe pumps, creating a look that strikes the perfect balance of the masculine and feminine.

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Creativity abounds even in the bold and freewheeling color palette, which featured clashing combinations of lemon yellow, lime green, cherry red, hot pink, electric orange, and vivid violet. They conversed with navy and neutrals to further enhance the collection’s fluidity.

In an interview with WWD, Raf said that the lineup talks about freedom but still in a way that “you think about getting dressed.” Their uniforms, for example, can still make a woman “feel as amazing, free, chic, and luxurious” as in a dress. And if there’s anything else that the collection can do, the Belgian designer and his co-creative director Miuccia hope that it will remind everyone of the world’s splendor.

“One of the things that we found very challenging is that the world is so hardcore now, but there is still so much beauty. And you have to deal with this one way or another,” Raf remarked. And evidently, the duo succeeded, with a collection not bounded by limits.

Watch the Prada Spring 2026 runway show below:

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