What do you actually do as a designer when you’ve designated yourself to show in last slot, in the last city, to an audience that has been looking at fashion for four weeks on young models who, by now, are so zombie-tired that the makeup seems to be slipping off their faces? Well, you grab the last shreds of their severely depleted attention spans, and sum up the season for them, if you can. That’s exactly what Miuccia Prada did at Miu Miu, the brand that has been such a runaway success, with the forties dresses and glittery shoes for fall 2011. And she did it all—but only by the skin of her teeth.
Well, Mrs. Prada might be uniquely endowed in having the industrial wherewithal to conjure up a collection midway through the shows, but it takes something rather more than financial muscle to amalgamate the season’s ideas in real time and then still make the whole look particularly your own.

At the beginning of the show, admittedly, it looked as if she wasn’t going to get there. Students of Prada have already dissected the fact that her acclaimed spring 2012 mainline collection was composed of separates made to seem like total matching looks, which is exactly how Miu Miu began, but with the components more clearly set out: high-waisted A-line skirts, bra tops with cropped, off-the-shoulder capes, and the odd fichu-wrap crossing the body and zipping up in back. All this was delivered in black and gray fabric—a recap of notions about mid-century modern tailoring, perhaps. That, and an intriguing stretchy, shirred midsection piece, like a pull-on, pull-up accessory, with which to cinch in a long shirt.