Opera critics should discuss Verdi’s Attila at the Metropolitan in terms of direction (by Riccardo Muti, a première), music and scenography. However, on Herzog and de Meuron ruin-like sets and post-apocalyptic forests stood singers dressed in… Prada. The subject may appear quite dusty, and the designs were thus barbaric indeed.

But it is interesting to look at this re-setting of Miuccia Prada’s ideas. One remembers the roman gold grandeur of Prada’s SS09, and the torn ‘slave-dresses’ of Miu Miu’s SSo9, but also the nineties-early 2000 brown leather obsession…

We must also remember the polemic that was going on about dressing singers that did not exactly possess a model-size. The result? It is undeniably bizarre to see Prada’s concepts intertwined with a specific historical context (mid-fifth century, even if Attila wore a LED helmet) and an opera production, but it is a beautiful résumé of the decadence of creased times (both Attila’s years and ours, as Miuccia’s interviews suggest).

Some have deplored the tackiness of the costumes, but there lays Miuccia’s ironic vein. She probably remembered  an eighties italian comedy about Attila, thus giving her designs the ambivalence between drama and deconstruction (those fringed boots!), as she always does. The color palette and the creased fabrics always inspire, and they perfectly complete the opposite feeling of Prada’s spring collection.

And last but not the least, the figure of the Pope is still a powerful example of Prada’s conceptual minimalism.

Photos Ken Howard, Sara Krulwich

More: about the opera / backstage with Prada