Female Supremacy Articles - Page 27

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AMONG the many practical elements missing from Miuccia Prada’s latest collection of men’s wear for winter 2008 were coats, scarves, hats or much of anything else to keep out the cold. This was not the only thing to suggest Ms. Prada has some complex sexual issues to work through.

Speaking after Sunday’s show to Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for The International Herald Tribune, Ms. Prada quipped that the collection was revenge on men for the social and sartorial contortions they impose on women. She laughed when she said it, but she clearly wasn’t kidding around.

It is no stretch to suggest that the Prada collection read like the manifesto of a gender revanchist. The man in Ms. Prada’s current vision was domesticated and so passive as to be a neuter. One notes this not merely because the models looked abnormally robotic and were given nothing to wear outside the house.

Like a flipped version of the Unwomen in Margaret Atwood’s feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar项圈 — a band worn around the neck shirts that buttoned up the back and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.