“Do we need femininity in this difficult moment to lift us up?” Miuccia Prada was asking rhetorically, while simultaneously gesturing upwards with both hands. A laugh eddied briefly in the post-show scrum—we’d just seen the bullet bras roaming her Miu Miu runway and a lot of people were still boggling at them. But Miuccia had not finished. “The typical accessories of femininity: the bra, the brooches, the fur,” she continued. “The question is what do we retain of femininity? Does it help in this really dangerous moment? In war time?”

Across this whole season, there’s been a movement towards plainer clothes and stripped-back shows, and Miu Miu is among them. A lot of reasons have been given for why that’s been happening in general—women craving simple-to-wear fashion, ‘intimacy’ over spectacle, the cost, the economy, and so on—but no one has spoken as directly as Prada about the effect on the creative psyche of living in an age of anxiety and fear. A line from her press release said more: “This season, we really wanted to create an elegance with nothing—through the everyday, through direct manipulations of simple pieces.”

Yet what a blast it was—a runway full of life, a characterful intergenerational cast of people wearing skewed vintage-y clothes, odd cloches, spectacles, teased bouffants, and a few apparently badly self-set 1950s granny hairdos. Aiding the scene were some well-known faces: Sarah Paulson, Lou Doillon, Gigi Hadid; and new: Eliot Sumner, Sunday Rose Kidman Urban, Xiao Wen Ju.

Miu Miu has in fact always been simple in principle. This season it meant there was a trove of items, reiterated: knee socks in a ton of colors, skinny lurex sweaters, bias-cut half slip skirts, fake fur stoles, ’40s or ’50s knee length peach or silver satin lingerie dresses, polo tops with oddly-angled zips. And of course, all those conical bullet bras.

These ideas didn’t come out of nowhere, of course. The familiar bourgeois Milanese lady-gone-wrong who turned up in her wonkily tailored skirt suits is a stock Miu Miu character. And if you scroll back on Vogue Runway to fall 1995—one of the early Miu Miu shows—there is the genesis of the ’50s-ish bras and visible underpants under knee length slips shown today. Looking around the guests at the show and the models on the runway, it’s clear that all this will come as completely fresh, as they weren’t even born in that century. Nothing wrong with that. Miuccia Prada earned the right to quote herself years ago.