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Softly textured beds, benches, lamps and appliqués scattered through the Rem Koolhaas designed set at Prada amplified the collection’s sense of sensuous domesticity
Credit: Courtesy of Prada

The new wave of battles in the culture wars will be fought on the home front, Miuccia Prada seemed to suggest at today’s brilliant, surreal and typically cerebral show.

But instead of a battle hardened and armoured proposition for Autumn Winter 2017, Prada instead centred subversive female sensuality in her consideration of the roles contemporary women play in both domestic and public, social and political spaces.

To further her creative vision, Prada enlisted her regular collaborator Rem Koolhaas, one of the world’s most lauded and influential architects, and his Netherlands-based design firm OMA and AMO, the research branch of the firm, to design a set that amplified an often provocative offering.

Koolhaas, who has just been commissioned with completing his first Australian work for the 2017 MPavilion, designed a set that narrowed in the confines of the usual Prada show space adjacent to the Italian house’s Milan headquarters. Continuous tile and wooden partitions then subdivided the space into “a series of consecutive sceneries”, creating an inside/outside divide that emphasised the duality central to the lives of women and the encroachment of one onto the other.

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Look 31 at Prada Autumn Winter 2017 borrows from pulp fiction illustrator Robert McGinnis’s renderings of femme fatale characters
Credit: Courtesy of Prada

A rich interior life, however, was underscored through the presence of the same vinyl covered beds that formed the backdrop for the January men’s show — this time dressed in textural, technicolour bedspreads that seemed to suggest a thoroughly 70s mode of thinking.

The walls of the space were also covered with postcards, clippings, posters, photographs and other visual flotsam from the same era, alongside femme fatale pin-up images sourced from the pulpy paperback novels of the 60s by Breakfast at Tiffany’s illustrator Robert McGinnis.

His prints also featured on a series of standout looks that suggested a vaguely sinister and sensual undercurrent borrowed from the covers of Brett Halliday murder mysteries, including A Taste for Violence, Marked for Murder, and Never Kill a Client.

Read into that what you will, then explore the inspired and incredible set below.

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Credit: Courtesy of Prada
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Credit: Courtesy of Prada
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Credit: Courtesy of Prada
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Credit: Courtesy of Prada

Tile and cover image: Courtesy of Prada