Prada takes the new season back to the future

Leave it to Miuccia Prada to define the look of the season. For autumn/winter 2002, she heralded the about-turn on love-and-peace peasant frills with her hardcore sex sophistication. And for next spring/summer she revisited the Sixties.

But this was no homage to Carnaby Street. This was Prada's interpretation of the decade's forward thinking in what looks likely to be the next big story: neofuturism.

Prada took the first tentative fashion steps into the old new-Millennium, an age in which the likes of Courreges and Paco Rabanne predicted we would all be wearing silver space suits and chainmail dresses.

Out first was a fluorescent pink satin cheongsam top worn with a bright orange satin skirt, followed by a lime-green satin dress, all worn with goggles. Moulded plastic appliqués in white, black, and aubergine decorated panels on full circular skirts and covered bathing suits.

But perhaps the most startling thing is that Prada's neofuturism confirms some of the trends that British designers at London Fashion Week were touting, namely fluorescent colours, Sixties futurism, and late Eighties/ early Nineties sportswear influences. Welcome to the (newish) future.