The Prada Lipstick Print’s History

In honor of National Lipstick Day, we’re turning our attention to one of Prada’s most iconic designs: the lipstick print.

Of all the exciting prints in the Prada universe, there’s something especially exciting and exceptional about the Prada lipstick print. Firstly, because it’s so surrealist and so deeply intrinsic within Mrs. Prada’s mastery of prints through the female gaze. Secondly because its most iconic form is the skirt; an object so sacred to the world of Mrs. Prada that it has come to define a higher state of dressing for generations of us.

Beyond all of that, few prints in fashion history have maintained such a legacy. The Prada lipstick print was heavily featured and analyzed in the 2012 Met Costume Institute exhibition Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, and it was also worn by Charlotte in Sex and the City Season 3.

Prada first debuted lipstick printed skirts on the fall 2000 runway in a few different variations. The skirts came pleated, low-slung, and covered either in rows of detached-looking surrealist shadowed lips in orange-y red or black-toned purple, or bullet-like rows of lipsticks in red and grayscale tonalities. The skirts were paired with low-key, minimalist turtlenecks and cardigans. Some of the lipstick and lip prints also traversed tops; and there were quite a few versions released on the commercial market, with and without pleats. A personal favorite is look 18 of the S/S 2000 show, worn by Sophie Dahl, who also appeared in the Steven Meisel campaign and Vogue Italia in February 2000. “The ABC of fashion,” was how Mrs. Prada defined up her collection at the time, according to Vogue.

Another really interesting thing about the print was how the Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations exhibition framed it. According to The Paris Review, Mrs.Prada cited her famous surrealist lip and lipstick prints as a nod to Yves Saint Laurent’s 1970s lip prints. But the museum contextualized the print alongside Elsa Schiaparelli’s famous lip motifs, most often created in collaboration with Salvador Dalí. It’s worth noting that Dalí had an artistic obsession with lips. Yes, he even made fantastic cosmetics with lip-shapes that likely inspired Pat McGrath’s own line.

The Prada lipstick skirt sat within the “Waist Up/Waist Down” section of the the exhibition. It framed Prada’s lipstick skirt as a symbolic expression of femininity, positioning the skirt as a canvas for adornment, offering expressive sculptural forms that reflect an iconography of feminine identity. The lipsticks themselves are arranged so neatly and in such a geometric form that from faraway they begin to resemble bullets. Given Mrs. Prada’s predilection for interrogating traditional ideas of femininity, the lipstick becomes almost an object of protection or a weapon; and a vessel of many different kinds.

The skirt is so iconic that the real life Charlotte (Kristin Davis) of Sex and the City fame wears it ’til this day. The original review of the collection from Vogue cited that it “evoked a cosmopolitan panache not seen since the jet-set ’70s and early ’80s” which makes it all the more iconic that it’s now in the SATC hall of fame forever. For fall 2018, Prada brought back the lipstick in all of its glory, placing the print on wrap skirts, shirts, bags, and pumps, and hybrid “split lipstick” shirts.

Today, the Prada lipstick skirt is the thinker’s ultimate grail because it’s an entire wearable thesis based on some of the most iconic moments in fashion and art: Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealism, Dalí’s devotion to detatched anatomy, Saint Laurent’s wit, and Miuccia’s Y2K theory of femininity as weaponry, all pleated into one knee-length wonder.