Prada Buries the Corset

Celebrities have been thin on the ground in Milan, in part thanks to fashion week’s conjunction with the Oscars, but a group came out for Prada, including Gal Gadot, Maya Hawke, Simone Ashley and Hunter Schafer.

Ms. Schafer was wearing a pink top and gray briefs under a black satin coat, about a week after having worn a floral Prada sundress to the Independent Spirit Awards. Which was right after she had posted a video on TikTok noting that she had just received a new passport that, thanks to a Trump administration executive order, identified her as male. Even though, as a trans woman, she had had female gender markers on her documents since she was a young teen.

“It’s impossible,” said Raf Simons, the Prada co-creative director, backstage, of Ms. Schafer’s situation. “But it’s happening.”

And it’s part of the reason the question of femininity — what it looks like and what might define it now and in the future instead of in the past — was the question of the season for Mr. Simons and Miuccia Prada.

Or rather, as Mrs. Prada said backstage, “What kind of femininity can you maintain in this difficult moment?”