After the Prada show, a photographer—cheeky, exasperated, perhaps both—asked what, exactly, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons had been up to this season. When the answer came—“interrogating femininity,” specifically, “what is feminine beauty today?”—he snorted: “Er, double Ds.” It was a joke, obviously, but not an inaccurate one. Idealized beauty remains the defining obsession of our age, only now it’s purchasable—nipped, tucked, lasered, and filtered into a kind of eerie digital perfection, a symmetry so precise it could only exist in the uncanny valley.

On the runway, Prada and Simons took a scalpel to the whole idea of feminine perfection—or maybe just a seam ripper. Little black dresses, stripped of their sensual slink, were rescaled into stiff, boxy near-abstractions, like someone had played a cruel prank on a ’60s sheath. Skirts were gathered into paper-bag waists that obliterated the hourglass silhouette entirely. Fabrics were thick, coarse—unyielding to the touch, almost repellent in their don’t-even-think-about-it texture. Seams were left glaringly exposed, edges raw and unhemmed, wrinkles pressed into garments (not incidental but deliberate, lived-in to the point of disrepair). A rejection of polish, an embrace of entropy—or maybe just an allusion to a post-coital rumple, a half-dressed, bedhead haze.

Prada’s long-standing thesis—ugly is exciting—was at work here, but the real substance of the show lay in its deeper, more loaded examination of femininity and its discontents. The cultural moment, after all, is crackling with variations on the theme. By all accounts, Demi Moore is barreling toward an Oscar for The Substance, playing an actress who opts for an anti-aging injection that—surprise!—turns her into an actual monster (because, obviously, Hollywood would rather see women mutate than age). Meanwhile, Amy Adams’s character in Nightbitch finds that the full-time demands of motherhood are so dehumanizing, she literally transforms into a dog. Femininity, in other words, is a trap.

“Within feminine beauty, when you think of its archetypes, there are lots of restrictions of the body—here, it’s free,” Simons explained. And sure, that was true of the deliberately un-sexy floral housedresses and man-sized coats, but it applied just as much to the sexier moments—the short, shaggy fur chubbies worn with nothing but heels, the split collars dipping just low enough to graze the nape of the neck, details meant purely for the wearer’s own pleasure. But the show’s sharpest point came through the non-sexiness of it all—the blunt, shapeless dresses, the austere cuts that refused to play into the standard rules of attraction. Because wearing something that doesn’t sit neatly inside the lines of acceptable femininity? That’s its own quiet act of rebellion, a subtle middle finger to the system. Or, as Prada put it, ever pragmatic: “We just talk about which clothes make sense now.”