Back in 2016, Raf Simons dedicated the FW16 collection of his eponymous brand to David Lynch. The show even happened on Lynch’s birthday, January 20th. Again, in 2019, stills from Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart found their way onto Raf Simons shirts and coats. Today, as Angelo Badalamenti’s The Pink Room from Fire Walk with Me played in full as part of Simons’ and Miuccia Prada’s FW25 show for Prada, it was in tribute to the legendary director who passed away only a few days before the show.

Returning to the Fondazione Prada in Milan, the set design of this season’s Prada menswear show recalled the scaffolding of a building site, or a particularly dangerous jungle gym. A huge skeletal frame of tubular steel housed the runway, beginning several levels up and descending to the floor like one of M.C. Escher’s impossible staircases. A grand patterned carpet, designed by Catherine Martin, softened the industrial metal and also inspired many of the loud patterns we saw throughout the collection.

The title of the collection was Unbroken Instincts and instinct was absolutely the operative word throughout. At first glance, many of the outfits looked mismatched. Loud colours clashed with each other, shirts looked startlingly like pyjamas, fur coats were worn without anything underneath, and the numerous floral cowboy boots (fans of Raf’s Calvin Klein will be pleased) refused to complement anything. But, in the fashion world, where immaculate styling is expected, Raf and Miuccia wanted to pay tribute to instinctual, impulsive decisions. As the show notes put it, “Unpremeditated contrasts result in unexpected and seductive combinations – clothing a body through instinct, unbroken by constraint of reason.” Or, to you and me, this collection was about putting together what feels the most correct to you, regardless of whether it all matches or even fits.

Therefore, we got shearling tops in cow-print patterns, t-shirts that looked like wallpaper from a 1970s bathroom, leather suits made up of several differently coloured leather swatches and jackets rendered in golfing tartan. Absolutely none of this should work and yet it is undeniably one of Raf and Miuccia’s strongest collections. They somehow seem to be only getting better and better.