During Paris Fashion Week, Miuccia Prada sent her models out onto the Miu Miu catwalk clad in a disarming array of aprons: blue workwear, kinky black leather, bejewelled bibs, a selection of dowdy frills and florals fit for Mrs Overall herself. Sandra Hüller looked ready for carpentry, Richard E Grant for some light smelting or fish gutting.
An accompanying press note declared the collection a “consideration of the work of women”, with the apron – “simultaneously utilitarian and decorative” – an apt emblem of industrial and domestic labour. The background inspiration was Women at Work, a recently published book by the German photographer Helga Paris, whose candid 1984 portraits of women taken in East Berlin’s state-owned Treff-Modelle Clothing Factory captured life on the garment line (the GDR had some of the highest employment rates of women in the world, with 89 per cent of women working by 1989). Reinterpreted for the runway with styling by Lotta Volkova, the result was a bricolage of styles and reference points, bulky layers giving way to underwear half-visible through lace.
Mrs Prada is phenomenally adept at narrowing her focus to a single garment or silhouette in order to amplify a wider message. Like a great rhetorical practitioner, she knows that there’s nothing like repetition to really lodge an idea. In 2022, she did it with her parade of cropped jumpers and micro mini skirts, creating a clamour for slutty uniforms and slashed hems that few could have anticipated (though in retrospect, the accompanying swing back towards thinness feels regrettably inevitable). Plenty of designers profess to approach fashion not just as an exercise in making and selling clothes but as a kind of quasi-anthropological study of what it means to be a woman in any given moment. Few manage to do it in a way that provokes not just conversation but genuine sartorial sea change. Given that, what are we to make of this resurgence of the apron?
Much has been made over the past few weeks about how we should interpret it in the context of the so-called trad-wife aesthetic: a digitally-led revival of domestic femininity that aligns nostalgic homemaking with moral order and pre-feminist family values. What is the line to be drawn between Emma Corrin’s flowery pinny, fresh off the Miu Miu runway and onto the red carpet for the premiere 100 Nights of Hero, and the global turn towards reactionary politics? Is it an explicit riposte, a case of moving with the current, or something harder to pin down?
Since at least the Renaissance, the apron has served a dual role as functional garment and prop in the theatre of feminine identity. Its oldest alliance is with the world of work, given that its main use is to protect the clothing beneath, whether the potential contaminant is blood, grime, chemicals, food, sawdust, or anything else with stain potential. From butchers, bakers and jewellery makers in the Middle Ages to maidservants in the Victorian era, it has been the practical choice for anyone getting their hands dirty.
It also has a long ornamental history. The V&A has plenty of examples in its archives of beautiful aprons made from lace or embroidered with intricate patterns, going back as far as the 16th century. These garments were never intended to be sullied, instead demonstrating the middle or upper class wearer’s capabilities as a wife (or would-be wife), becoming the perfect symbol of honourable womanhood and domestic order.
Literature is likewise littered with examples of the apron as a garment that pivots between vanity and utility. In the 19th century it’s everywhere: appearing on the pages of Gaskell and Eliot; stiffened into propriety in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management; weaponised by Dickens in Great Expectations, where Mrs Joe’s “coarse apron, fastened over her figure behind with two loops” becomes a simultaneous point of pride and marker of martyrdom – the perfect uniform for her self-appointed reign of domestic tyranny.
By the time we reach Virginia Woolf, the symbolism has turned spectral. In The Waves (1931), Susan imagines herself “like my mother, silent in a blue apron locking up the cupboards” – an expression of feminine longing (“I shall have children… a kitchen where they bring the ailing lambs warm in baskets”), following a social script that Woolf herself would later attempt to exorcise in her essay Professions for Women (1942), where she describes killing “the Angel in the House”, that Victorian phantom of self-sacrifice and obedience.
The apron’s aestheticisation – complete with all those loaded cultural connotations – is nothing new. Fashion’s obsession with workwear, and specifically its professed desire to reinterrogate women’s work, has always been cyclical. What distinguishes Miuccia Prada is her willingness to sit in contradiction, much as is to be expected from a former member of the Italian Communist Party who is now one of the industry’s most influential fashion designers. Her approach thrives on this tension between ideology and product, always inviting in the friction, the irony.
Given that, it is no surprise that she has chosen the apron as her current garb of choice. She’s always attuned to the times, even if her commentary remains elliptical. Her aprons aren’t an answer so much as a warped mirror, catching and distorting the present moment. No-one’s going to be wearing them to do the washing up (if you can afford one, you’ve probably got someone else doing that for you) – nor to go to work in a factory. What they offer instead is a fantasy of labour underpinned by serious(-ish) thinking about women’s roles at home and beyond – much as the micro mini offered a fantasy of sexpot power dressing that played with the rules of propriety. In Mrs Prada’s world, everything is an exaggeration, and nothing is to be taken too sincerely.