Getting to the Prada show required some improvisation. A motorcade — SUVs, fluttering flags — blocked the route to Fondazione Prada, and rather than miss the opening look, this reviewer abandoned the car and walked, past the street-style photographers, the influencers posing mid-pavement, and the K-pop fans stationed behind barricades with handmade signs. Inside, two front-row seats ringed by six security guards turned out to belong not to pop stars or socialites but to Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla — his first ever fashion show. Strange, perhaps, but not entirely surprising in a season where tech billionaires and fashion editors seem increasingly to occupy the same rooms.

The set matched the mood of the collection before a single model appeared. Walls covered in doors and fireplace mantels. Eighteenth-century consoles beside twentieth-century lamps. A sixteenth-century tapestry against industrial walls. Entire rooms from different eras, sliced open to reveal what they contained — which turned out to be exactly the visual metaphor for what Mrs. Prada and Raf Simons were doing with the clothes.

The format was unlike a conventional runway. Only fifteen models were cast, and each appeared four times. With every exit, a layer came off, revealing what had been underneath all along. Bella Hadid opened in a canvas jacket that appeared to be peeling at its edges, then returned in the sheer black coat that had been styled beneath it, then in a white dress with a printed hem previously glimpsed under taffeta, and finally in a rough-cut knit tank and sporty drawstring shorts — her microfloral embroidered knee socks and purple lace-up kitten heels the only constant across all four walks. The other fourteen models followed the same logic, each shedding to expose what was already there: a chunky pink knit coming off to reveal a 1950s hourglass dress, unzipped at the shoulder with a Prada logo tank showing beneath; a sheer black floral embroidery dress — pulled from Mrs. Prada’s Fall 2017 collection, a “fragment of history” she called it backstage — worn over a green knit top and loosely tailored pencil skirt, with trompe l’oeil fraying at the hem.

Mrs. Prada described the idea as exploring “the complexity of layering — complexity, which exists in sentiment, in politics, in life, and that reflects in clothes.” Different personalities, different sexualities, different moods, all lived together in a single day or a single life. Simons continued the thought: “It’s also how you dress, the clothes that you decide to have, how you decide to dress. What is possible? There’s another way and another way.”

It’s a collection that works on several levels at once — which is, of course, the point. On the most practical level, it’s about getting dressed in the morning and shedding layers as the day demands. On a more philosophical level, it’s about the self as accumulated history, visible in fragments if you look closely enough. And on the level at which Prada has always operated most distinctively, it’s about the fact that clothes carry meaning — political, personal, historical — whether we intend them to or not.

That Prada can host a tech billionaire in the front row while producing work that is genuinely radical, that it can be one of the largest fashion brands in the world while remaining fundamentally rooted in creative integrity and expression — this is precisely what makes it what it is. Political and cerebral and eccentric, but also pretty and joyful and made for real life. There will, as ever, always be more to discover.