This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.

There is only one show on the fashion week calendar that guests show up an hour early for. Only one show that turns the press feral as they stampede backstage. Only one show that consistently reinvigorates the scene’s late-week dwindling small talk. But why exactly do we go so gaga for Prada?

One way to answer that question: Sunday’s fall 2026 Prada men’s show, for my money the best since Miuccia hired Raf Simons as her co-creative director.

Everything about the event reaffirmed that Prada is operating on another level in men’s fashion today, starting—of course—with the delicious pre-show panini at the Fondazione Prada venue’s Wes Anderson-designed Bar Luce. Then there was the outlandish set, the Prada-owned museum’s auditorium reimagined as a gutted Georgian manor, which supercharged the anticipation in the room as it filled up with celebs like Damson Idris and Maya Hawke.

Then came the clothes, and it was immediately clear that Mrs. Prada and Simons had landed on a big idea this season. Specifically a strange, singular silhouette realized with long, slinky coats and blazers that caressed the models’ narrow torsos, shirt cuffs erupting out of tiny sleeves. (Crucial to any great Prada collection, there were also a bunch of crazy hats, some affixed to the back of coats, flattened like they’d been crushed in a hydraulic press.)

Those coats! Few other collections make you think about normal clothes in a radically new way, and this lithe shape felt familiar—Mrs. Prada and Simons are no strangers to a slim fit—but also futuristic. Prada shows have a way of shaping the broader style zeitgeist, and midway through the show, I was already picturing the outerwear Ozempic-ification that will follow in this collection’s wake.

Perhaps in a nod to the polarizing effect of the rail-thin runways, there were also a number of trenches that had a fuller shape. When a journalist in the ritual post-show rugby scrum surrounding the designers asked about the lean silhouette, Mrs. Prada threw up her hands and said, “That’s fashion!”

Prada’s most recent men’s collections have not been quite this definitive. Mrs. Prada and Simons treat fashion design as a cerebral art practice, and in 2025 the duo’s work got weird and dense as they reacted to the rise of algorithmic taste with a bizarro style assemblage guided by (as they put it at the time) emotion and instinct rather than reason.