S1 E21

WEEKLY NEWSLETTER FROM ANDREA BATILLA

WHERE HAVE WE ENDED UP, MY DEAR LADY!

It would be extremely interesting to ask Roland Barthes, structuralist semiotician and author of the ever-undervalued The Fashion System (1967), to comment on the opening text from the Prada website, which I quote here in full along with the accompanying photo:

“Days of Summer
An expression of the carefree joy of the season, the Prada Women’s Collection explores a new idea of romanticism. Tailored lines are lightened in airy layers; feminine touches are woven into unexpected contrasts. Each garment is a chapter in a new summer story, where the simplicity of the sea and urban elegance coexist.”

The protagonists of the campaign are Kendall Jenner, Hunter Schafer, and Troye Sivan, photographed by Oliver Hadlee Pearch.
Photo and text together are a perfect metaphor for the current state of fashion—a small, frosted glass trinket forgotten on a dusty shelf that has simply lost its meaning.
The three stars are depicted standing on a brightly colored little boat, adrift in an artificially calm sea, in an unreal atmosphere that could be the opening scene of a Hitchcock’s The Birds remake directed by Ti West. It’s all so devoid of emotion and narrative that it takes on horror-like tones—even the three megacelebrities seem swallowed by this terrible parallel dimension where signifier and signified have gone their separate ways.

The accompanying text, on the other hand, seems to describe a cheerful little scene using press release language from the '90s. There’s an untraceable “expression of carefree joy,” a nod to a mystifying “new idea of romanticism,” and the inevitable “tailored lines lightened in airy layers” or “feminine touches woven into unexpected contrasts.” The final summary is that “the simplicity of the sea and urban elegance coexist.”

From the cemetery in Urt, where Barthes is buried next to his mother, one can almost hear him stirring at this most daring use of fashion language.

And yet, Ms. Miuccia Prada’s website paints a fairly accurate picture of the fact that fashion today has stopped assigning symbolic meaning to clothing and generating believable narratives. That role has been handed over to a brigade of emissaries ranging from megacelebrities to the most obscure TikTokers. Content is produced randomly and then scattered across the globe under the seal of sky-high prices that spark heated debate—yet also a kind of distant respect meant to preserve the aspirational quality of brands.