Banal Eccentricity, 1996

Prada's Spring 1996 show looks almost deliberately difficult in archive photographs: avocado greens, muddy browns, awkward sandals, prints with the suburban cheer drained out of them. It doesn't have the instant legibility of Versace sex or Chanel's logo theatre. Even the title, Banal Eccentricity, sounds like a private joke told by someone who expects you to work a little.

That was part of the force. Prada's own archive lists the show as SS 1996 womenswear, with the runway broken into exits like evidence. Vogue dates the collection to 1 October 1995 and describes the palette around avocado greens, sludge browns, mixed clashing prints, and sandals that seemed to resist prettiness on principle. I like that phrase, resist prettiness, although it risks making the clothes sound pious. They weren't pious. They were odd, dry, and sometimes funny.

Miuccia Prada had already made luxury behave strangely. She took over the family company in 1978, and the nylon backpack of 1984 had done something quietly rude to the old leather-goods hierarchy. Nylon was not supposed to be the material of desire. It was supposed to carry gym shoes, rain, airport irritation. By the mid-90s, that same intelligence had moved onto the body: ordinary fabrics, sour colours, deconstructed shapes, the kind of domestic pattern that looked as if it had escaped from a kitchen curtain and found itself in Milan.

AnOther's account of mid-90s Prada gets the shock of it right. The show has become folklore as the moment avocado, ochre, chartreuse, turquoise, lilac, and brown turned from bad taste into a proposition. Kristen McMenamy opened; Amber Valletta, Kate Moss, Shalom Harlow, Kirsty Hume, and Carolyn Murphy followed. Marcos Valle's "Rio Boogie" played underneath, which is a detail I enjoy because it gives the whole thing a lightness the clothes sometimes refuse. There was music, movement, models with faces fashion already knew, and still the collection would not do the expected glossy thing.

The easy reading is that Prada made ugliness chic. True enough, but too neat. Ugly chic was not just a reversal, as if she had taken an ugly object and stamped beauty on it. The better trick was making taste feel unstable. A brown could be ugly in one room and exact in another. A Mary Jane could read schoolgirl, dowdy, perverse, clever, or all four by the time it reached the end of the runway. The collection didn't ask to be liked. It made liking look like the least interesting response.

nss magazine's history of ugly chic notes the 1950s patterns, Mary Janes, dreadful purples with avocado greens, and muddy browns, and also repeats the strange show-day detail of a bomb scare at Prada headquarters. That almost sounds too symbolic, the literal threat arriving before the aesthetic one, but fashion history is full of these impolite coincidences. Editors still went. The show mattered enough to risk being late, or frightened, or both.

Alexander Fury later called Miuccia Prada the master of "ugly", arguing that she makes the undesirable desirable. That is close, though I think the verb "desirable" smooths the texture too much. Desire is part of it, yes. So is embarrassment. So is the tiny social panic of noticing that the thing you dismissed as wrong has started to organise the room.

What survives from Spring 1996 is not merely a colour story or a shoe shape. It is a permission slip for fashion to mistrust its own good manners. The collection made taste look less like an instinct than a learned reflex, and once you see that, the whole polished surface gets less convincing. A bad green starts doing philosophy. A clunky sandal becomes an argument with the mirror.

Sources:

SS 1996 Womenswear — Prada

Prada Spring 1996 Ready-to-Wear — Vogue

When Mid-90s Prada Made Ugly Chic — AnOther

Ugly Chic: How Miuccia Prada Revolutionised the Fashion Industry — nss magazine

Essay: Miuccia Prada - The Master of "Ugly" — SHOWstudio