Elegantly waisted

IT'S A HOT afternoon in Shanghai and swarms of people are wending their way through Shanghai's Peace Hotel, one of the numerous historic buildings that line the Bund. On display throughout the hotel is Miuccia Prada: Art and Creativity, a travelling exhibition that opened last week and runs until the end of the month, before moving to Europe and the US.

It's the latest in a series of collaborations between the worlds of fashion and art. Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its Chanel exhibition, which pays tribute to one of the 20th century's best-known designers and the label she created. And Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto's Juste de Vetements exhibition is currently on view at the Musee de la Mode et du Textile in Paris.

But the contribution from 'Mrs Prada' - as she's known to her Milan staff - differs from the typical retrospective. Rather than display a collection of designs from over the years, Prada focused on one of fashion's most simple forms: the skirt.

'Skirts are unfamiliar objects for an art exhibition,' says Kayoko Ota, curator of the exhibition. 'They're part of our daily lives and are a familiar subject in fashion. Despite this, things in fashion change so quickly and we no longer remember them. They disappear into history. That's why this exhibition is important.

'Skirts are very malleable. They make various movements, and even though they're familiar, they're an area where creativity and inventions have taken place. We want to show this.'

The result is a series of 10 installations featuring more than 120 Prada skirts, from her first womenswear collection in 1988 through to her latest, plus several items from the archives.