Currently, affairs are tumultuous, to say the least. International markets stumble; European borders slam closed; turmoil bubbles. It’s foolish to think fashion exists in an isolated cocoon, or an ivory tower, ignoring the world outside its rarefied sphere. At base, it’s foolish because these things—economic sanctions, falling stock, stymied global movement—affect the buying patterns of even the world’s richest. No one is wealthy enough to be insulated from the rest of humanity. On another level, an intelligent, intuitive fashion designer naturally seeks to make work that represents the time in which they live, and contributes to a wider cultural landscape. They’re part of the conversation of their times. What touches more people than the clothing on their backs?

That’s how Miuccia Prada operates. For one of the most willful, singularly talented, and individualistic designers working in fashion today, her output is marked not by her own whims but by a curiosity about other people, about the world she lives and works in. “That is what is really interesting,” says she. “What people relate to, what fascinates them, how the fusion of fashion and culture makes people react.” Miuccia Prada’s clothing is interesting because, at the end, she is interested in life, in her times, and in representing that through clothing.

Prada staged her Fall 2016 show in a complex, multilevel set designed to evoke, she said, “a square for ceremony—a gathering of the rich, the poor.” The ceremony she referenced was the “auto-da-fé,” the Spanish Inquisition’s public sentencing of heretics. It’s tempting to compare that to a designer’s experience of showing their work to critical masses, but Mrs. Prada had bigger fish to fry and larger concepts to engage with. “Immigration, famine, assassination, pessimism,” were words she threw out backstage, terms you seldom hear uttered in association with luxury clothing. Then, she grinned. “But I’m not a pessimist!”

She is, however, plugged in to the troubled times around her, and she allows them to influence her clothes. It’s how she elevates them above the masses of garments created by other designers, and ensures they say something significant and distinctive. For Fall, said clothes were torn, bedraggled, wrenched away from the body in a state of disarray, a visual representation of the uncertainty of the contemporary. Today is what interests Mrs. Prada, despite her frequent references to the past. (The latter were plentiful, in worn and aged fabrics, creased and mis-buttoned cotton shirting, battered canvas twill, knits fraying to yarn.) “It’s an excursion through history,” said Prada, surrounded by a set that collided classical colonnades with Ikea-y plywood, “connecting what’s happening now with what happened in history—to see if there’s anything we can learn.”