Prada changes tone. A provocative grand tour from Vivienne Westwood

"The most important thing for us was to seek a change of tone: from aggressive and powerful to gentle, calm, human," says Miuccia Prada expressing her and co-creative director Raf Simons' feelings at the end of the Prada fashion show.

The dismantling of superstructures, the reductio ad unum by pursuing impulse instead of reason is the intent that pervades the entire ordeal: impossible and made all the more poignant by the fact that the dismantling of meaning and power, on closer inspection, is not fully realised or does not occur at all, but reverberates everywhere with the compressed energy of an unfulfilled desire - whether we want it to or not, fashion is a highly thought-out mise-en-scène, especially at this height of the spectrum, where a workshop-like, fabricated proceeding insists relentlessly. Everything is bare: the set doesn't exist at all, so that the empty room of the Prada Foundation Depot is clad only in huge lobed carpets, abstractions of flowers between kindergarten and salle de bain. The collection notes are reduced to a barrage of lapidary phrases, including 'unlimited combinations of elements/ simple light-heartedness/ imaginary places'. The clothes, in the end, have lean and essential lines, or archetypal ones like the acetate jumpsuit and the overcoat, and always tend decidedly towards the childish, with shirts that stretch out like pinafores, trousers that shorten like rompers, and the distinction between male and female illumined in a prepubescent position. Over all, lacquered straw hats and hiking backpacks in hand for moments of immersion in nature. The desire to go against the tide, to avoid competitive poses is laudable, but again results in a kind of algid infantilism that is somewhat contrary to the initial urgency. It would be interesting, in the idea of a change of tone, to witness a real change of pace, a break from the formula, otherwise it is words in a vacuum and reiteration of the known.

The punk rebellion, vitriolic, messy and spontaneous, with the symbolic middle finger always raised in the face of the well-wishers, is part of the ethos ofSimon Cracker, the joint project of Simone Botte and Filippo Biraghi, based on salvage and bricolage and harbinger of an immediately recognisable, marginal and challenging aesthetic. There is something adolescent in the stubbornness with which these two designers resist the idea of conforming, bringing together on the catwalk the creme de la creme of Milanese outcasts, but this collection has a more adult, consciously and expressly Margielian rigour, which strips away colour and refines form, and the result is convincing.

At Magliano, Luca Magliano takes a sabbatical: instead of a fashion show, he proposes a film, while the collection itself is conceived around the idea of suspension, and moves liquid and porous between deconstructed formalities and hybridisations with other worlds - the crepe de chine running suits are remarkable - confirming and enhancing the authorial point of view in the obligatory focus on the product.

Andreas Kronthaler, from Vivienne Westwood, returns to show in Milan and chooses a café under the arcades of San Babila to stage a highly provocative and sartorial Grand Tour idea, as per the Brit cliché. The world constructed by Simon Holloway for Dunhill is totally Brit, and of a radical and fascinating anachronism in its convinced evocation of atmospheres of unleashed privilege. One either appreciates it or finds it timeless, tertitium non datur, but one cannot but commend the impeccable execution, without the slightest smear.