MILAN — The fashion world is obsessed with celebrity and wealth to its detriment, but this season’s woman of the zeitgeist might make you think the art of idol worship is improving. Miuccia Prada, one of the few female fashion designers and certainly the most powerful, is Vogue’s March cover star, rather than an Oscar nominee, model or musician.

Prada, 74, is to this era what Karl Lagerfeld and Tom Ford were in previous decades — not just dictators of trends, but a person whose star shines so brightly that they are, to popular culture, the fashion designer archetype. She is exactly the kind of woman the fashion pack wants to venerate right now: extravagant in intellect and style. Obsessed with ideas, she has philosophy and history books in her bedside reading stack, buys art not to collect it but to understand it, as she told Vogue, and she has equally cultivated taste in clothes and jewelry. What she says goes: she puts swim caps on the runway and suddenly shoppers are hunting down swim caps; she says miniskirts are chic and everyone buys them, often unable to wait until Prada’s version even hits the stores.

Prada and her co-creative director Raf Simons have spoken a lot lately — and especially with the collection they showed Thursday — about the importance of the emotional reaction over the intellectual experience. But what hits you when you see their clothes are the kinds of wild, interrogative and imaginative conversations — about womanhood, trends and history — that led to the strange garments before you.

The Fall 2024 collection was greeted like a film from a favorite auteur — electrifying, slow-burning and conspiratorial. It was a journey through the clichés of western women’s fashion — macho tailoring, the bustle, peeks of lingerie, shift dresses, the soigné patches of fur that once proved a woman had arrived.

Like a great visual artist, she takes something in the air and puts it into her collections, but it never looks or feels familiar. Instead, you see that thing anew — here, as Simons and Prada explained backstage, journalists thronged around them, it was about the “love,” a word they both used, of women’s fashion, and a desire to show these redundant ideas in new ways. (Bags were not carried, for example, but belted onto the wrist.)

But there was also a dark undercurrent — the tussle between the desire to project power with masculine clothes and the need to retain whatever feels feminine to you, the dresses covered in a swarming locust of bows (take that, coquette-core!). Some of these clothes were head-scratchers, but their weirdness and even awkwardness is what makes them so good — they give you something to chew on. Are we too reliant on feminine sweetness? Are we doomed to be forever unsettled in our quest to have it all? What is the point of repeating a trend if we forget its original context?

Overall, the commercialism and conservatism — not always the same thing! — of Milan Fashion Week suggest a one percent that is fearful, obvious and ignorant. For too many people, shoppers and designers alike, the purpose of fashion is merely to belong, rather than to seek out that which is beautiful, delightful or thoughtful. Even the simplest idea in luxury — to spend money on things that will make your life a bit easier, smoother — seems to have mostly disappeared.

Take Gucci. De Sarno spoke a lot about reality in his press notes: “my dreams, as with my fashion, always converse with reality. Because I am not searching for another world to live in, but rather of ways to live in this world.”

And yet it is hard to see his clothes in real life: the women wearing his pieces from Spring 2024 in the show’s front row looked glam, but they were yanking and tugging at their shoulder straps and necklines. The fall collection’s emphasis on the status coat is cool: beautifully cut outerwear done in colors and finishings that a 20-something would covet. In fact, it is so obviously the kind of garment that consumer would want — expensive-looking, with a pedigree of craftsmanship and yet also unironically covered in spangles — that they probably already have it. Maybe that doesn’t matter. But still, how often are you going to wear a floor-length camel coat covered in sequins and paillettes? Is that worthy of your daily dog walks or even your commute? What about a plane trip to a fancy ski resort? Even if you’re taking a private jet? I’m just thinking about reality here!

Ferragamo’s 20-something designer, Maximilian Davis, is a little surer of who he’s speaking to — his models, including Mona Tougaard and Colin Jones, all go gaga about him backstage. He has a bit of a Gianni Versace relationship with them — it’s like he’s draping his goddesses.

But while there are excellent puckers in his shows, like a thick masculine coat worn with fluffy shoes, a liquid blue sequined sweater dress and a sequin gown in a color that can only be described as arrogantly lemon, his collections have too much filler, like they’re speaking to a woman who endlessly makes Net-a-Porter wish lists and orders, thinking she needs all these clothes — a bunch of trousers, weird cocktail dresses, some knits because sometimes you’re supposed to look casual in power settings. (And for heaven’s sake, can designers put Paloma Elsesser, a curve model, in some tailoring instead of a sack dress?) Really you just need a few precise things with a sensual snap.

At only one show during Milan did the real world actually manage to creep in: Bottega Veneta, with a doom and gloom landscape and color palette. While creative director Matthieu Blazy has made a splash making leather look like denim and other tricks that the kind of person on the art fair circuit might find naughty, he decided to go real this season as a statement of sobriety — every fabric was what it looked like. A notebook print was meant to signify the possibilities ahead — the hope of something better to come, or the necessity of planning in the aftermath of an apocalypse. “Dressing is what brings us to dignity. It’s what makes us human, you know,” Blazy said backstage. “When there is nothing left, you still try to make something of yourself.”

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But it underscored the tragedy of making rarefied clothes that have the poetry of the average world citizen’s concerns: it’s hard to imagine this resonating with the kind of person who buys a $9,200 dress.

Actually, the collection that resonated most this week wasn’t at all political. The Swiss brand Bally is in the midst of its second revamp attempt since 2022, this time under Simone Bellotti. The designer, who has a pale beard and soft, attentive gaze, showed a cheerfully received debut last season, which shocked him. “I just knew that I liked it,” he said a few days ago.

Well, he’s got good taste. Bellotti, unlike most luxury creatives, designs on a smaller, human scale — his shoulders are soft, unstructured and have a trapeze shape; a coat dress is artfully draped with a peak of blond shearling underneath. A number of looks had little bells, something Bellotti dreamed up after researching Swiss mountain rituals — there were bells on shoes, leather vests, handbags or in a model’s fingers, ringing down the runway with the gentlest chime.

Bellotti and Bally’s CEO, Nicolas Girotto, have made the brand’s pieces accessible, compared to much of the other stuff shown on Milan’s runways — you can get a gorgeous handbag for $1250, and its Plume shoe, a boat-shoe style that looks as cool with jeans as it does with a tuxedo, is $990. Again, not affordable prices — but for a luxury brand, not insanity, and unlike a lot of other things you might come by at that price and higher, it looks ravishingly well-made. These are accessories you could save up for.

Bellotti’s collection was transportive in its charming originality, but totally grounded in the real world, or as real as fashion can be — some clothes to hold onto for a long time, to protect you with warmth and integrity, whether you’re famous, but especially if you are not.