The Prada Flame Shirt Is Performance Art

The fashion world orbits in such a way that autumn sometimes starts in July. A short-sleeved Prada lounge shirt that has recently attracted the rubbernecked gaze of menswear enthusiasts was among the wares that the luxury house introduced for its fall-winter collection, in January, in Milan, in a warehouse decorated to convey luxurious bleakness. Emerging into the wild on the backs of Instagram celebrities, and also actual celebrities, including hip-hop’s Pusha T and Hollywood’s Jeff Goldblum, the shirt is a flamboyant exemplar of several trends. It belongs not to any one season but to a years-long period of decadence characterized by the parallel trends of street-stylish elegance and proudly obstinate ugliness. The garment is a short-sleeved button-front shirt, of the cheerful sort recently in vogue. The fashion dude on the new “Queer Eye,” Tan France, is a de-facto spokesman for a movement toward patterns iterating whimsical motifs: flowers, tropical fruit, exotic birds, playful crustaceans, island scenes, kaleidoscopic abstractions, and so on, well beyond such standard insignia as preppy sailboats and go-to-hell aquatic mammals and timeworn Tiki-culture Polynesian danseuses. Read more at The New Yorker.