Fashion has never met a girl — can we say that? — like Donatella Versace. A chemical blonde, a confirmed smoker, a busy figure in black stretch pants, Versace gets that she is always verging on self-parody.

For better or worse, she is Versace. Or, as she said before her dynamic show Friday night, “Take it or leave it, it’s Versace.”

The recession has made designers here seem tentative. On Thursday, Miuccia Prada offered a murky collection. While many of Versace’s skimpy dresses were based on a formula, and relied on reworked archive prints, she at least made her preferences clear. And with customers reacting almost instantly to clothes — or not reacting at all — it helps to spell out your differences.

Versace’s hemlines were bluntly short. She mixed baroque silk prints with flat strips of aluminum, and repeated the prints on clear vinyl minis. She set out exactly two pantsuits, in micro-dot cotton ventilated with stretch chiffon. The colours were bold shades of peach, lavender, pink and chartreuse — flattering to many skin tones.

At the end, when the models assembled on a ramp — blondes, brunettes, a redhead, but mostly, it seemed, yellow blondes — they looked like regenerated versions of her.

When the gates and doors of Prada’s industrial compound finally opened on Thursday evening, when the guards stepped aside (after informing you that, though you had arrived on time, you were too early) and waiters appeared belatedly with trays of frothy White Russians and lemony drinks, the air inside was stifling. One taste of alcohol and you’d be hoisting the person next to you like an Oktoberfest stein.

Speaking of kitsch, Prada served up the sort of seaside prints you find on souvenir postcards. If the prints — on silk coats and skirts — lacked irony, it’s probably because the trip is a familiar one. This collection, weak by Prada’s standards, opened with slim gray shorts shown variously with cropped loose-back jackets in a silk and nylon blend, and shells covered with clear plastic ornament.

“She moves my eye,” Ron Frasch, the president of Saks, said after the show. The message in the first looks — the steely grays, the proportion of the formal little jacket with the sporty line of the shorts — was completely clear. It was real. But then Prada couldn’t find more to say. She used raw edges, but the effect wasn’t integral to the whole. Shapes became indistinct, or she fell back onto old ones, like the soupy sun top and briefs.

Backstage, she said, the collection was somewhere between “reality and fantasy.” Nowadays, that’s called limbo.

Contemporary Forms, the title of Giorgio Armani’s collection, on Thursday, implies many shapes, but perhaps the dominant one, from Bauhaus to Mondrian, is the square. Visually, Armani intersected the body at the waist, made a neat square with minimalist tailoring and did the same, with a softer hand, for short skirts.

The crisp jackets that opened the show were a reminder of Armani’s breakout years. And shown with dark crepe trousers, in micro checks or with details like small gathers at the shoulders and then narrow three-quarter sleeves, they were appealing and fresh.

Armani is less convincing as a man of the mini. Though it was clear what he was up to — light, young-looking clothes in punchy colours — the compact shapes sometimes resembled crowded-up boxes. The eye needed relief.

What worked effortlessly were some of the one-shoulder dresses in abstract prints, and an evening tunic in a dark blue and rose silk print slipping over red shorts.

Of the many collections crammed into the Milan schedule, the sweetest may have been Alberta Ferretti’s. Ferretti is known for layered chiffon dresses that keep up with one trend or another. But on Friday, she set her own course — with serene dresses and tissue-weight cotton coats that fell below the knee. She also had the idea of putting a kind of linen or crocheted apron — open at one side or crisscrossed in the back — over a plain little chiffon dress.

The effect was charming. And there was no stereotypical woman. Looking at the longer dresses in smudged shades of violet and gray, I thought of hip mother-of-the-bride clothes. Don’t laugh. It’s probably a huge demographic.