Watching a Prada catwalk show has turned in the last few seasons into a fun exercise for me, consisting in spotting where the real inspirations for the new collection came from.
For the Spring/Summer 2012 season, Miuccia Prada claimed she moved from golf, used as an excuse for having fun since – she stated – she isn’t really a fan of the “gentleman’s game”.
The bright coloured prints of the shirts, the rhinestones and studs scattered here and there on bags, shoes and shirts weren’t indeed desperately “golf”, but they evoked the funny moods of certain films linked to golf.
Indeed the only good movies about golf are the Hollywood flicks in which this sport is used as a background for some music and dance numbers or for a few comic gags, since films focusing only on golf are usually considered as slightly tedious and also a bit pretentious.
Miuccia knows her cinematography pretty well, so she must have known the best golf movies to pilfer - pardon - take inspiration from.
In fact it was easy to spot in the tailored pieces references to early classics such as Monte Brice’s 1930 The Golf Specialist starring W.C. Fields as J. Effingham Bellweather and an incompetent caddy (Al Wood) with a funny oversized floppy hat (a more wearable version of the floppy hat reappared in the caps donned by the models on Prada’s runway).
Charles Reisner’s Love in the Rough (1930), a musical comedy featuring Robert Montgomery, that heavily relied on costumes and fun dance routines rather than on golf, and Sidney Lanfield’s Follow the Sun (1951) with Glenn Ford were probably a good inspiration for the more romantic glimpses in the collection and for the checked jackets as well.
And while the fun and light moods were definitely borrowed from The Three Stooges’s Three Little Beers (1935) that features some tragic consequences for an innocent golf course, the acid colours called to mind the shades of comic cult film Caddyshack (1980) by Harold Ramis and of Happy Gilmore (1996) by Adam Sandler.
Apparently the prints of dancing couples, and people surfing and golfing were instead inspired by a vintage shirt, though the style of the drawings also echoed Fiorucci in a rather obsessive way.
There was anyway another strong inspiration: the coloured prints used for some of the jackets and blouses towards the end of the catwalk show displayed a strong derivation from Brioni's collections (such as the Spring/Summer 1962 or mid-'70s collections - check out the second image in this post).
Like in Prada's S/S 2012 collection, in those Brioni designs there were some strong references to Americana and cowboy shirts, and this would prove that, rather than looking at another country, Miuccia was maybe sitting in her office quietly leafing through some vintage magazines to reinvent (and repackage) a past too many of us have by now forgotten.
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I miss the three stooges and their adventure hope there will be remake of the series or maybe in big screen.
Posted by: Vested | August 19, 2011 at 07:58 AM