Prada is for the “Esaurita” Woman
ESAURITA /e·ṣau·rì·to/
An esaurita woman in italian is someone who is completely drained, overwhelmed, or running on empty—often in a way that feels chaotic or even slightly unhinged. It can be used humorously to describe someone who is stressed to the point of barely holding it together, but still pushing through life with a mix of frustration and resilience.
Image credit: Prada
Femininity is one of the most complex and evolving terms in our society's cultural context. Can anyone ever be able to define what femininity should look like? I believe anyone can do it easily from a mono-dimensional standpoint. Still, it gets even more interesting when someone manages to do it from a multi-dimensional point of view–and Prada is probably one of the few brands that manages to do it.
Naming the collection “Raw Glamour” gives also a multi-dimensional approach to what glamour means today. We are used to naturally connecting the word “glamour” to the world of what we consider to be luxury, looking “expensive” or even to have a certain type of lifestyle, like Hollywood. Prada distorts this stereotyped common perception and draws attention to the inner complexity of what being glamorous means, managing to do so in a way that it arrives at a sweet point of redefining what femininity could look like today if we had the option.
The rawness of it all is that a person can primarily manage to exude confidence by not caring, and the Prada woman and man don’t care. And at some point in anyone’s life, we all get to that point eventually, even from the smallest types of decisions. It’s like when your mom tells you when you’re a child that a dress looks bad on you because it’s not cinched enough at the waist and it doesn’t “accentuate your figure”, so as a way of rebellion you decide to wear it anyways, because you simply DON’T CARE. You like it, period. And the same scenario applies to hair, make-up, shoes, even your face–” if you keep telling me to smile more, I’ll just frown a little harder, mother”.
Image credit: Prada
So then that young woman/man who never cared grows up to become an adult eventually, and this is when things get even more interesting–because now it is not just “your mother” who tells you that you need to brush your hair in the morning and wear clothes that fit your figure. You realize it had always been society’s stereotypes of what femininity should look like: confined, uncomfortable, basic. So as a result you decide that you will keep wearing that same loose dress, you will keep trying to fit an oversized shirt inside your oversized skirt, wear that acid yellow dress that nobody liked and for sure decide not to comb your hair. Because life as an adult becomes harder, so you don’t have to prove yourself to anyone anymore, and that’s liberating. You have places to go, places to be and fast, so a curation of every single detail to adjust yourself to what being feminine should look like is just too much work. LIFE IS TOO HARD ALREADY – plus you didn’t sleep enough last night.