Prada Spring 2010 Men´s.

The quotes that dressed the set came from old black-and-white movies that highlighted conflicted masculinity.


(Twelve Angry Men, anyone?) The backstage drink was a Black Russian, stark black and white, just like the canapés that were served.


(You can work wonders with cream cheese and pumpernickel.) But if such things suggested absolutes, Miuccia Prada knows that in a black-and-white movie, it's the grays that count.


This singular fact shaped the film noir show she mounted for Spring 2010.


"Men are stuck with gray suits," she decided, so she set out to test the limits of that cliché.


Suits, yes, but pared to their barest bones, perforated, stripped of sleeves and any traditional accompaniment. Shirts? Fuggedaboudit.


The option was a raw-hemmed, silky V-neck. The fact that it looked like ragged lingerie played right into Miuccia's wicked yen to unhinge masculinity, to introduce a way for the trapped urban male to, as she put it, "feel sexier, more beautiful, more sensitive—he wants to be vulnerable."


Perforating this poor guy's clothes was one way to open him up, so Miuccia made a mesh of coats, jackets, pants, even shoes.


Perverse (or commercially astute) as she is, she also offered suits untrammeled by trickiness.


There was even a briefcase that was just about as "straight" as anything she's ever offered (almost as if she wanted to reassure the guy whose sense of self she'd just punched holes in).


But if there was one caveat in Prada's mesmerizing new collection, it was in its physical presentation, which was ineffably, airily for the young. Not the young at heart—the young! It's their world. We just live in it.