Presented in June at Milan fashion week, the Prada spring/summer 2025 men’s collection challenges the perception of reality with a refreshing youthful spirit.

There was something sinister yet energising about the set at the Deposito di Fondazione Prada, where lighting flashed from a Brothers Grimm fairytale-like hut to the beat of the Faithless dance hit Insomnia.

Models strolled along a white-fenced runway wearing distressed suits and shrunken vintage-like floral shirts with collars and hems that had been ingeniously wired and deformed.

‘We wanted to create clothes that have lived a life, that are alive in themselves,’ said Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons backstage, ‘as if they’re clothes that you already live with’. The creative duo conceived a mind-altering performance where trompe l’oeil tricked the viewers’ senses. High-waist tailored cotton trousers look like tweed, featuring 3D-printed “belts”. The same approach recurs throughout the knitwear where cardigans and jumpers merged into polo shirts and crewnecks in a signature Prada colour palette: bright yellow, acid green, burgundy and light blue.

This distortion of senses continues through sunglasses that bring the wearer to alternative realities: images of a cheerful crowd at a gig or a tranquil sunny beach are stamped on the lenses. Blurring the lines of reality, this collection might look like Prada’s take on Plato’s allegory of the cave, where reason is the only way to experience reality. However, openly avoiding attempts to conceptualise their garments, the creative duo reclaimed a naive spontaneity: ‘Sometimes you decide things without necessarily understanding why,’ they said. ‘We wanted to make this about what you want to wear now […] not too constricted or contrived or architectural or conceptual: more like free youth spirits.’