Time is synonymous with luxury and craftsmanship has become its highest expression. The ancient art of handmade tailoring by masters of the needle and using noble materials is currently the great differential brand of large brands and Miuccia Prada defends it tooth and nail through her haute couture collections.
In her tireless pursuit of beauty, the Italian creative director opens the doors of her workshop to the public to highlight the work of her artisans and reveal the best kept secrets of her historic profession. Under the title Impossible embroideries, Prada’s new project praises tailoring and its time to create designs that take your breath away and are presented on the catwalk as authentic works of art.
The Milanese brand has selected two pieces from its latest collection, a black dress with fringes and embroidered flowers and a skirt with eyelets of different sizes, to detail the complicated manufacturing processes step by step. “Complex techniques are needed to create garments composed solely of fringes and embroidery,” explains the firm. The creation of the pieces is always manual and requires processes that can take several days of work: three to five days to complete the skirt and eight to ten days to make the dress, the crown jewel of the highest line. from Prada.
The garment features extremely complicated embroidery, involving fine, moving threads, such as fringes and cutouts. First, the fringe strip is placed on a frame and cotton gauze. The fringe is then sewn following the contour of the neckline, and then sewn by hand to create an embroidered lining. With smooth stitches, included are 36 meters of rhinestone chain, 12 meters of metal chain, 160 rhinestones on the bezel and 120 micro cups. Following each stitch and pinching the fringe with the chiffon, the micro chain rhinestone crystal flower is individually embroidered.
“The embroiderer executes soft, sinuous curves and applies stitches that are neither too tight nor too long so that the fringes remain flat and their movement is natural and fluctuating,” details the Prada creative team. Each dress, they add, has 16 embroidered flowers (the making of each of them requires ten hours of work) that, once finished and the frame dismantled, the gauze is removed thread by thread and the dress is left on a mannequin 24 hours.
The challenge in designing the fringe skirt adorned with 75 eyelets lies in its structure. The embroidery machine spreads the threads over a surface to comb them and give them a uniform and compact appearance. Then, embroider the loops of fringe thread with thick, precise stitches at the points where the buttonholes will be added. Finally, the artisan manually places the eyelets one by one with the help of a riveter.
The art of embroidery, noble and sacrificed, threatens to disappear due to the lack of generational change. A problem for luxury houses that, through projects like this, seek to make this type of professions fashionable again.
