‘The world has become conservative,’ says designer Miuccia Prada as Milan men’s show tries to resist the algorithm

The day before the US presidential inauguration, it was impossible for Miuccia Prada to avoid the question. When designing her collection, just how much was fashion’s most radical intellectual thinking about Donald Trump?

Speaking backstage at her show on the opening weekend of men’s fashion week in Milan, the 75-year-old designer, who grew up a communist and believed, like many of her generation, that change would come not through capitalism but through revolution, could only laugh. “Is it an answer to what is happening? Yes,” she said. “The world has become conservative.” As for the clothes, it wasn’t so much an autumn/winter 2025 collection as a riposte to “the first season of artificial intelligence”.