At Prada this season, everything starts from the waist down. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons turned the skirt - a garment every woman has in her wardrobe - into the centrepiece of the entire spring-summer 2027 collection. At Milan Fashion Week, 63 looks came down the runway, and every one had a skirt. There were no trousers and no dresses.

The decision looks simple, but it carries an old obsession of the house: take something familiar and change the way we look at it. The skirts came in every form - bell-shaped, with an eighties silhouette, pleated, leather, chiffon, embellished. Some had side slits through which colourful fabrics peeked out; others carried embroidery, sheer panels or a touch of shine. Above them there was often a lace bralette, visible and deliberately sensual against the more severe skirts, alongside knit tops with frayed edges, shirts, bomber jackets and check pieces. A constant game between the everyday and the ornamental.

Every season the industry hunts for a big visual hit, a new trend, a new colour, a new reason to buy. Prada chose the opposite: one garment, repeated 63 times, as the collection's entire argument. You don't need to multiply the codes to say something clearly - it's enough to look at one from different angles. The skirt here isn't a passing trend but a space for expression.

The irony isn't small. A fashion house that lives off selling the new is sending a message every grandmother in the Balkans knew without a runway: one good piece, worn ten ways, lasts longer than ten trendy ones. Will shoppers take it that way, or walk out of the show with a list of 63 new skirts? That's the question Milan isn't asking.