When Miuccia Prada, who had a PhD in political science but no fashion or design experience, took over the family business in 1978, she did so through gritted teeth. But this Italian intellectual went on to become the most consistently influential international designer through both the 1990s and noughties. Perhaps her status as an outsider gave her a broader vision of fashion design, understanding how it fits into the wider creative firmament and beyond to the world of politics and current events. Even today, she stays relatively aloof from the fashion game, with a much-cited penchant for walking in the mountains in her spare time, wearing the dirndl skirts of her youth.
As the journalist Alessandra Galloni pointed out in 2007, Miuccia Prada has spent most of her career apologising for what she does, her collections expressing her own ambivalence towards her involvement in fashion. By the time she had reached her mid-fifties, she had formulated a strong case for fashion, convincing herself (as much as anyone else) of its importance and relevance in society. ‘It’s true women often don’t want to admit it. And yet fashion enthralls everyone … Some say it’s about seduction, but I think that’s limiting. What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.’ She is a risk-taker, constantly pushing the boundaries of taste, including her own, excited by the challenge of moving fashion forward. Each of her collections, said Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview magazine, is ‘some kind of throwing down the gauntlet to established ways of thinking.’ An outstanding example of this was her autumn/winter 2008 collection in which she explored lace, treating its reinvention as an intellectual challenge. Her starting point was to avoid the colour white. Lace, for her, was an opportunity to explore ambiguity, to posit a series of interpretations, although in the final analysis she expressed herself still uncertain. ‘I still don’t understand why I like lace,’ she said. ‘But it is such an accompaniment of women, through childhood, marriage and being a widow.’
The very speed of change in fashion both frightens and enthralls Prada. ‘In the end, I like the changes,’ she said in an interview in 2004. ‘In fashion, once you’ve got something, you’re already thinking about what’s next … Every day I’m thinking about change, it’s a constant anxiety and probably a reflection of society’s anxiety in general. The big deal about fashion is really very recent, this hysterical pursuit of newness. It may be a good thing, or a bad thing, but it’s really defining this moment.’
Suzy Menkes, fashion editor of The International Herald Tribune, made the contrast with many of Prada’s contemporaries in fashion: ‘While designers mostly live in a fashion bubble, she has an urgent connection to what is happening in the world … No other creator has the same ability to distill the essence of what is modern, sampling the cultural heritage, anchoring shifting society and making it all seem relevant.’ Paradoxically, Miuccia the intellectual has recently sought to theorise less about fashion, voicing a plea in interviews that the clothes should simply be allowed to speak for themselves. While enjoying the pressures of the modern fashion system and its commercial imperatives, she has also gone through periods of depression over its constant demands. ‘Now the world is so complicated and loud, unless you scream no one listens,’ she said in 2006 with a hint of resignation. Her youthful enthusiasm for communism has clearly influenced her approach to design: challenging bourgeois notions of good taste, opting for the unconventional time after time, creating seemingly ugly colour combinations and looks that both bemuse and enchant. Ironically, the price tags on her accessories and clothes put them out of reach of all but the wealthy—a paradox that has certainly not escaped her attention.
Like many great designers, she was a double act from the beginning, having met her husband Patrizio Bertelli shortly after she took over at Prada. A passionate, combative personality, Bertelli was a supplier to Prada through his company, I Pellettieri d’Italia, based in Arezzo. He is generally considered the business brains behind the growth of Prada, although his wife has emphasised his creative contribution, too. ‘If I hadn’t met him, I probably would have given up—or at least not been able to do what I have done,’ she said. In the late 1990s, Prada developed into a group of designer labels, overextending itself through ambitious acquisitions that delivered poor returns. The financial fallout, which took many years to sort through, hampered the growth of Prada but did not stop Miuccia from producing a stream of outstanding collections that delighted and baffled fashion buyers and editors in equal measure.
Grandfather Mario Prada founded Fratelli Prada, an Italian leather goods business, in 1913. Miuccia was born Maria Bianchi in 1949 to Luigi Bianchi and Luisa Prada and had an isolated childhood for reasons that are still unclear but which culminated in her being adopted by her mother’s sister in adulthood. By the time she reached university in the late 1960s, the student wave of political activism was at its height. Miuccia, with a PhD in political science in her sights, was captivated by the energy of the period, signing up to the Communist Party and becoming fully engaged in the fight against capitalism. She has played down this period in interviews: ‘I was young in the Sixties, when Italian society was first becoming obsessed with consumerism, but my big dreams were of justice, equality and moral regeneration. I was a Communist but being left wing was fashionable then. I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.’
However, she had another side to her intense personality—that of the bohemian with a creative streak, dressing in Yves Saint Laurent for a student march, studying mime at Milan’s Teatro Piccolo. All this changed in 1978 when she took over Prada, which had been run by her mother following her grandfather’s decision to step aside after World War II. Progressing to the family business was a tough move, she recalled. ‘You know, I had to have a lot of courage to do fashion,’ Prada recalled, ‘because in theory it was the least feminist work possible. And at that time, in the late Seventies, that was very complicated for me. Of course, I liked it a lot but I also wanted to do something more useful.’
Miuccia Prada’s impact was not immediate. For seven years, she learned the nuts and bolts of her new trade, developing experience and confidence with the support of Patrizio. She did not sketch, preferring to work at a conceptual level, and then building a collection from there. The breakthrough came in 1985, when Prada sidestepped the family heritage in leather and produced a collection of heavy-duty nylon bags that became must-haves for fashion editors the world over—with their readers in hot pursuit just a step behind. The handbag was reborn as a key fashion accessory, while nylon was rediscovered as a fashionable material. The nylon bags rapidly turned the Prada label into a fashion powerhouse, although it was another four years before Miuccia launched ready-to-wear in 1988. Her first collections received a mixed response, but by the end of the decade were setting the tone for a new spirit of minimalism, following on from a decade characterised by excess and extravagance. ‘The reason Prada works is because it whispers, it doesn’t shout,’ she has said. ‘If you want to be recognised wearing my clothes, you can be. And if you don’t, you don’t have to be.’
But sometimes Prada could shout—regularly, her collections oozed a sense of a designer challenging her own instincts, attempting to work against her own notions of good taste, as if embarked on an intellectual exercise for personal stimulus. ‘It’s very easy to know what I like and it’s very easy to do what I like. But I tend to have, let’s say, good taste,’ she said. ‘This is very boring for me. So, basically, I have to work with what I think is bad and wrong. In my company they’re always worried about that, everyone is always complaining.’ Prada says she is rarely interested in a look. She works on a concept, often referencing the past, but resolute about making it contemporary. For her spring/summer 2009 collection, she drew criticism for sending the models down the runway in python-skin platform heels (some of them fell over). The clothes them-selves—’cave-woman couture’, she called them—were still more provocative, deconstructed, mixed up, crinkled and rumpled. It was an exercise in sophisticated seduction that puzzled and excited her audience in equal measure.
With her interest in other creative forms, Miuccia set up the Prada Foundation in 1993 to showcase leading contemporary artists. Outside her office window, she installed a playground slide that descended three levels; this playful touch was in fact an art work by Carsten Höller. She also worked with leading architects on her stores, including Rem Koolhaas for New York and Herzog & de Meuron for Tokyo. An installation, titled Waist Down, which toured Asia, America and Europe in 2005 and 2006, highlighted both her seriousness and playfulness with its focus on skirts designed by Miuccia, including her popular circle skirts. In 2008, she commissioned a short animation, Trembled Blossoms, to mark the spring collection, a lush landscape of flowers and nymphs with suggestions of Art Nouveau, Liberty and Aubrey Beardsley. Other projects have included temporary architecture-specific wallpapers, environments and interactive media for the Prada Epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills and Tokyo in a series of collaborations.
The fashion business grew simultaneously. A second label, Miu Miu (her nickname), was launched in 1992, bringing the Prada vision to a wider audience. Prada Sport followed in 1994. In the late 1990s, Prada Group joined in the enthusiasm of the time for acquisition, snapping up an extraordinary portfolio of labels, including three of the most admired designers of the era—Austria’s Helmut Lang, Germany’s Jil Sander and France’s Azzedine Alaia. This marriage of talents proved disastrous: Sander resigned twice as the business that bore her name struggled to break even, while investment was unsuccessfully lavished on turning Helmut Lang into a superstar. Prada Group hinted at a stock market flotation on a number of occasions in an effort to put its finances back in order, only to cancel time and time again. When the global economic crisis erupted in late 2008, Miuccia Prada was left lamely musing that maybe her business was not the kind of business that was best suited to the financial markets. The more high-profile scrutiny of the markets would certainly not be to her tastes. Prada herself avoids the celebrity circuit. ‘I am a very private person and don’t like the high-profile nature of the fashion business. It’s dangerous to have such a large public image and I’m not as interested as some designers in becoming famous because it would take away the realities of my life.’
She has adapted more enthusiastically than many of her contemporaries to the speeding up of the fashion system in the early twenty-first century. This trend was driven by the fast fashion of mass-market companies such as Spanish retail brand Zara. As a young woman, Miuccia Prada was content to develop an idea that could be relevant for six months. By 2008, however, she commented that an idea might satisfy her for two days. The turnover of ideas has become ferocious, she acknowledged. ‘My goal now is to change our stores every two months—that’s what I would like.’ An eloquent interviewee, Miuccia Prada has made comments over the years that reflect the insecurities that many people working within the fashion industry share as to the true status of their chosen profession. Her brilliance has been to turn this insecurity to powerful use through a series of inspirational collections, driving forward fashion to its current status as a key component of modern popular culture.
Further reading: Miuccia Prada speaks eloquently about her own work, so interviews with her are frequently illuminating. Vanessa Friedman’s interview for Ten (autumn 2000) was particularly incisive. Susannah Frankel spoke to her in ‘The Feeling Is Miuccia’ (21 February 2004) for The Independent. Alessandra Galloni wrote ‘The Designer Defends Prada’ (25 January 2007) for The Wall Street Journal.