The Trench Coat Will Not Save You

A response to a recent Prada review in Purple Magazine, which suggests emotional survival begins with a pistachio trench coat. I beg to differ.

There are sentences that haunt you. Some are by Joan Didion. Some are from your therapist. And then there’s:

“Like it was stolen from a sad clown in residence at Villa Medici.”

This is not an AI-generated Mad Libs prompt. It is, in fact, a real sentence published by a real person about Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection in Purple Magazine, the highbrow-slash-eyebrow fashion publication that often reads like someone dared a philosophy undergrad to describe a handbag after doing molly. And knowing who runs the magazine… this might actually be the case.

I read the review…if we can even call it that…by a critic named mavERIC. I read it the way one reads a ransom note or an overlong wedding toast: with equal parts confusion and morbid fascination. I needed to know what Prada had done. Had they saved the world? Had they burned it down? Were we ghosts now? Is the trench coat the new Ark?

“Prada isn’t making fashion of the times. It’s making fashion for those who survive them.”

Okay, Blade Runner.

But the thing is….and I hate that I must say this….I get it.

Not the review though. That’s unreadable.

I mean the impulse and the performance and the need to say something profound, poetic, post-apocalyptic about a pistachio-colored trench coat. I’ve done it. I’ve been there. I am that girl. Or at least I was.

The portal opened sometime around 2018. Maybe earlier. The Instagram Fashion Critic™ emerged, part thinkfluencer, part cultural theorist. And suddenly, we all became mini Susan Sontags with Wi-Fi in a digital web where fashion wasn’t fashion anymore, it was grid formatted scripture. You didn’t wear Margiela, you deconstructed the notion of wearability itself. You didn’t post a fit pic, you staged a digital archive of selfhood.

And yes, I was part of that. I still am, sometimes. It’s hard not to be, especially when there are brand checks, designer gifting, and a built-in audience for long captions that read like a dissertation on the politics of mesh tank tops. But lately I’ve had to ask myself: Is this genuine? Or am I just performing “fashion person” again for the algorithm? Do I even like this? Or do I like the idea of being someone who gets it?

Honestly mavERIC’s Prada review is less about Prada and more about mavERIC. It’s less about clothes and more about the performance of intellectualism dressed in Comme des Garçons. It’s a linguistic stew of pseudo-poetry and brand ambassadorship meant to solicit ad dollars disguised as insight.

“Cuts are sharp but never oppressive. Leathers are worn, coats are weightless, knits are stiff like childhood memories one refuses to let go.”

Girl, what?

At some point, online fashion criticism turned into fan fiction. It stopped being about cut, fabric, or silhouette and became a kind of emotional cosplay where instead of reviewing the clothes, you projected onto them. Every collection had to be a metaphor for something bigger: climate grief, late capitalism, your third situationship of the year. The garments becoming emotional support text bubbles, little screens onto which we could paste our feelings, politics, and personal mythologies, all while pretending we were still talking about fashion.

And yes, sometimes I still find myself doing it. I’ll write something like, “These slutty little shorts are a confrontation with the fragility of masculinity in a queer futurist framework.” And then I immediately want to throw my fucking phone into the Seine. But it’s addictive. It looks smart. It feels smart. Until you step back and realize you’re just saying things to make yourself feel more in control of a cultural machine that couldn’t care less whether you “contain anxiety” in your knitwear.

There’s something both seductive and exhausting about the persona of the Fashion Intellectual™. Because ultimately, it’s cosplay. And we’re all playing along. Even Miuccia and Raf are in on the joke now……designing for men “in emotional, affective, existential transition,” whatever that means.

(Spoiler: it means they’re selling you a $4,000 coat to cry in.)

“It feels like Prada has understood what the world refuses to admit: all that’s left is to dance in the ruins. But in pieces tailored like haikus.”

….Girl, maybe it’s just a trench coat.

The real-world response to this kind of overcooked “resistance” is telling. One commenter said they “feel like doing some gentle resistance by going to the Prada store,” while others asked, “this is still up?!” or flat out demanded, “Delete this.” And some even called it “out of touch with reality,” pointing out that the world’s literally burning, in part because of overconsumption, and yet here we are, dressing consumerism up as resistance.

So maybe it’s time we all take a beat. Log off. Touch grass. Fold a T-shirt without calling it a meditation. Prada is still Prada, expensive, aspirational, and occasionally moving. But it’s not therapy. And it’s definitely not resistance. It’s a nice coat. A very fucking nice coat. Maybe even the trench of our collective dreams. But let’s not pretend it’s going to save us from late-stage capitalism or whatever mavERIC thinks we’re surviving in.

Sometimes you’re just putting on clothes.

God save us from ourselves.

And also from anthracite socks.