MILAN (Reuters) - Miuccia Prada raided the kitchen cleaning cupboard for innovative fabrics for womenswear next winter, dressing her models on Tuesday in materials that looked like sponge cloths, black plastic and insulation foam.
Prada, famous for dressing "The Devil" on the cinema screen, packaged her models like fragile consumer goods in calf-length sheath dresses of foam-like fabric.
She put Spontex sponge cloth-effect tops in acid green or black with skirts which stopped below the knee in the same fabric colored black or robin's egg blue.
Black shiny plastic was stripped into inch-wide feathering to create a glossy crow's back look on a dress or provide a flirty yoke to an orange skirt.
But she also gave the audience of buyers and journalists beautiful black wool tailoring in swing-back coats and dresses that were reined in under the bottom with a half-belt.
Prada's futuristic looks echoed the theme of Giorgio Armani's show on Monday, when the designer, known for his classic clothes, dressed his vision of the woman of the future in metallics and silks, flat pumps and "cybernets" over hair.
Armani's Emporio Armani show is on Wednesday, with Gucci later in the evening. Dolce & Gabbana pull out the stops for their trademark line on Thursday and Versace comes out on Friday, just ahead of the close of fashion week on Saturday.
THE FUTURE IS BACK
Earlier on Tuesday, Gentucca Bini went back to the 1940s for her show for the Romeo Gigli fashion house, inspired by a decade when women cannibalized men's clothes for a feminine take on a masculine look.
Showing a mix of prints, colors and textures, her models skittered down the catwalk under instructions to think of a day out shopping.
"I said to them 'smile as if you're going to the supermarket'," Bini said. "It's very feminine when a woman smiles," she added, saying models with straight faces looked a bit grim.
The models wore a collage of big red and green rose printed tops, red shiny plastic coats, silver-white silk trousers and maroon and blue-striped tops.
Textures were also diverse, from Gigli's trademark fleur de lys on elegant dark silk evening suits to a tufted dark yellow wool sweater worked to look like moss on a forest floor.
Bini said Tuesday's show, at the exhibition halls, was more technical, but fashion as culture and art remained a theme.
Alberta Ferretti's models wore silks, mohairs and metallics at her show, a mix of styles and fabrics that showed off the designer's skills and would show off a woman's curves.
A dove-grey chiffon dress with ruched asymmetric panels swept right to the floor while an evening gown in deep blackberry velvet was sheared below the knee into fringes and held up with a halter neck.
Models stepped out in mohair shift dresses for daytime in soft woodland green or berry violet, with big coats to match belted at the waist and flared to the knee.
Ferretti used shading to take a dress from dove gray at the shoulder all the way through to black at hems which came just below the knee. And then she used metallics in bronze and gold to panel the front of dresses, hinting at warriors but keeping the mood distinctly feminine.
