Prada’s Worn-Out Aesthetic and the Labour It Erases

Prada’s Autumn/Winter 2026 menswear show didn’t look new. The clothes arrived scuffed and stained, their surfaces deliberately unsettled. Edges were worn back to expose the material beneath. The collection presented garments not at the beginning of their lives, but staged to appear as if they had already been worn.

That appearance matters because real wear is not an effect. It is a record. It accumulates evidence through labour, repetition, constraint, repair and time. Creases, stains, and abrasion register bodies that have occupied garments day after day. Wear is biographical. It is inseparable from class because it emerges from necessity rather than choice.

The show worked hard to detach wear from that reality. This is not a question of intention; it is a question of function.

The venue made the mechanism visible. The Deposito of the Fondazione Prada was staged as a cutaway interior: stacked wall panels, blocked-in doors, false windows, fireplaces and panelling bolted into a single hall. Seams and joins were left exposed. The lighting grid sat overhead in full view. The room performed decay as set dressing. The runway floor looked spotless; a pale carpeted path of control running through a fabricated dereliction.

That contrast is the key. Degradation was permitted only on the clothes. The system surrounding them remained perfectly ordered. Lighting, seating, choreography, timing and photography functioned with institutional precision. Nothing in the environment suggested labour, fatigue or risk. The setting did not ask the audience to see garments damaged by life. It instructed them to read damage as culture.

The close-up images confirm this. Exposed edges were deliberate and controlled. Stains were distributed with care. Fabric looked weathered but never structurally compromised. The illusion of decay was tightly managed. These garments recorded no use. They required no endurance. They belonged to no one. They remembered nothing.

This translation matters because real wear is not symbolic. It is evidential. Sweat stains, repairs, alterations and material failure force the acknowledgement of absent bodies. They point to work done and time endured. They do not elevate experience. They record it.

Luxury fashion has increasingly broken that link. Distress is manufactured to produce the appearance of age without its history. Sandblasting, bleaching, laser abrasion and controlled degradation create garments that look lived in but have never been worn. Wear becomes a style rather than a record. Damage is staged, not endured. Wear circulates as texture, not evidence.

Distressed clothing has long drawn on working-class visual codes. Holes, stains and frayed seams originate in manual labour, poverty, repair, endurance and limited choice. They are marks of constraint. When luxury brands adopt that look, they borrow its authority while refusing its conditions. The aesthetic is retained, but the reality is removed.

This staging depends on labour of its own. The appearance of wear does not produce itself. It is manufactured by workers tasked with simulating fatigue, abrasion and breakdown for garments that will never be worn until they fail. The visual language of working-class wear is extracted once as style and again as labour, while the people involved at both ends remain absent.

The show’s press release did not use the language of dirt, fatigue or constraint. Instead, it spoke of memory, care, civilisation, duration and respect. Wear was not presented as evidence of bodies or work. It was reframed as value and philosophy: “impressions of life” and “a sign of respect”. Visible damage was translated into abstraction.

The collection operates within that system and makes its logic explicit. Rather than disguising the artifice, the show elevated it. Staining became concept. Wear became archaeology. The clothes were presented as if they carried accumulated thought rather than accumulated use. The press release performed the laundering, stripping wear of class, labour and fatigue and replacing them with ideas about humanity, framed as memory, respect, and ‘universal’ values.

However, the lives invoked by this language remained unspecified. There were no names, no communities, no workers, no conditions of labour. There was only a vague universal subject.

Prada reframed this extraction as archaeology. It spoke of archaeologies, of excavating lives, thoughts and beauty. But that excavation belonged to the institution, not to the people whose material reality was being aestheticised. Labour was not celebrated or even acknowledged. It was abstracted. The brand claimed the authority to interpret and display, while working-class wear was reduced to raw material.

This does not make the collection empty; it makes it symptomatic. Contemporary luxury no longer rejects the look of working-class life. It consumes it, neutralises it, and returns it as atmosphere. Wear becomes decor. Labour becomes allegory. Dirt becomes design.

Under those conditions, absence is not an oversight but a requirement.

The people whose wear made this aesthetic legible went unacknowledged. Their labour survived only as surface.

Images courtesy of Prada. Reproduced for the purposes of criticism and review.