Word: fabric
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Like Prada, there are a handful of designers over the past decade who have made headlines with fabric. In the mid-1990s, Helmut Lang and Jil Sander started incorporating techno-fabrics like nylon and carbon into more traditional weaves, giving them a lighter hand or a three-dimensional quality. They pushed the boundaries, often employing far-out materials like rubber and plastic. More recently, Alexander McQueen has expressed a ghostly romantic vibe with fine spiderweb netting. Francisco Costa has been playing with perforated latex and stretch scuba at Calvin Klein. And at Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld reintroduced the idea of rubber...
...fashion insider knows it's through fabric development that you can divine what's next in fashion and what will come down the runway, say, for spring 2008. Even while designers were putting the final touches on their fall 2007 collections last month, they were dispatching fabric teams to the big trade fairs?Premiere Vision in Paris, Moda In in Milan?to scour the market for spring 2008. And looking at those fabrics is like looking into fashion's crystal ball, especially if you are a designer like Prada, who is widely considered one of the most adventurous when...
This is Prada's hallmark: irreverence mixed with industry. Her love of fabric dates back to her childhood and her family history: her mother was originally from the Como region of northern Italy where the silk textile factories are located. "I had silk in my hands all the time," Prada says, "the finest silk made with the thin threads of silk?a quality no longer available...
Indeed, Italy's mills?from the silk manufacturers of Como to the wool and sportswear producers of Tuscany and the cashmere and menswear fabric mills of Biella?are Europe's largest producers of luxury textiles. And, along with the Japanese, Italians are considered among the greatest fabric innovators. "They innovate by constantly looking outside their industry for ideas," says Angelo Uslenghi, a Milan-based textile cool hunter. "There is not much new you can do to yarns and weaves, but you can look outside the textile industry at other industries such as fine jewelry where they use techniques like filigree...
Another source of inspiration is embellishment?something that Prada has been refining for years. "To do something new, you have to combine fabrics," Uslenghi explains. "You bond different fabrics, fuse them together." Looking even further ahead, to spring 2008, he says textile mills are using lots of sculpting and etching techniques that create a kind of bas-relief effect on fabric. A traditional, rich fabric like silk shantung, for example, will be woven with very coarse yarn and linen hemp so that the surface looks embroidered, "almost in an arte povera way," Uslenghi says...