The Great Escape

This season, Miuccia Prada has her eyes set on getting away from it all. Her crystal-embellished spring 2010 ready-to-wear collection featured bright, retro photographic prints of sandy shores and palm trees (shot at a man-made resort in Japan), silhouetted against bright skies and colored lens flares. As an offshoot to this, she debuted a colorful line of “Postcard” sunglasses, each one accompanied with a balmy portrait of a seaside city—from Santa Monica, California, to Cornwall, South England. Her obsession this season with transparent acetate and sepia-tinged imagery makes a wistful, escapist nod to the futuristic stylings of the 50s and 60s, when fashion was suddenly inundated with a plethora of man-made materials. The era is evidently something of a running theme for the arch intellectual of Italian fashion, given her very latest offering—a capsule collection of vintage-inspired print dresses. For those of us not quite brave enough to don Prada’s transparent acetate shoes and crystal harnesses this spring, the capsule is a wearable slice of the retro fantasy, comprised of wasp-waisted sundresses covered in archive Prada prints, with neat ballerina flats and handbags to match (or mix and match). The small line is available now from selected Prada boutiques.