![]() “Maybe I can say I don’t love fashion,” Prada confided in 2004, “but I love clothes completely.” Those early designs, created through a symbiotic relationship with Prada’s devoted design team and stylists, led to clothes that Vogue described as “uniforms for the slightly disenfranchised.” Collections developed through somewhat cryptic messaging from the creative director. Prada admits that “since I was 13, I’ve never parted with any dress I bought.” When I went to visit her in the early ’90s, her closets-that included her mother’s clothes and those of her two sons-filled whole rooms of the family villa, jostling for space with the impressive collection of iconic works from the key figures of the Arte Povera movement. Prada, spring 2012 ready-to-wear Photo: Monica Feudi / “Clothes should always represent your vision of yourself,” she has noted, “or what you want to represent-even if it’s only for one night.” She enjoyed, for instance, an obsession with uniforms and the idea of “dressing like a nun, very sober, without any vanity,” and found that gave her “a lot of confidence…I think it’s very elegant,” she said. It seemed fashion was intended for women who wanted to please society-women who were objects.” Citing her admiration for fellow women designers including Vivienne Westwood, Sonia Rykiel, and Rei Kawakubo, her own designs were uniquely subjective. Prada gleefully took on the challenge after she realized that fashion “is a way to be connected to what’s happening in art, design, music-the general culture of the time.” She also disparaged the fashion system of the late ’70s and ’80s and the clothes that she felt were “designed in a commercial way, not a personal way. She finally did so in 1988 (Miu Miu followed in 1993). ![]() Raf Simons for CALVIN KLEIN 205W39NYC, fall 2017 ready-to-wear Photo: Yannis Vlamos / įor Prada, clothing design was almost an accidental adjunct to her reinvention of the family brand that she inherited in 1978-it took Bertelli several years to persuade her to branch out from rethinking modern luggage (which she had done by using the resilient woven Pocono nylon previously employed only for coverings to protect the company’s expensive items to make them instead) to reimagining modern clothing. (That emporium initially specialized in oggetti di lusso-“luxury objects”-that, in keeping with the taste of the times, included glass from Bohemia and jade from the Far East, but ultimately became known for its high quality luggage, fit for Italy’s royal family). Prada was born to a bourgeois Milanese family-her father’s company made lawn mowers for putting greens her quietly elegant mother inherited the celebrated luxury leather goods company founded by her own grandfather, Mario Prada, in 1913 in Milan’s soaring Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade. His mother was a cleaning lady, his father a night watchman in the Belgian army, but his education in taste began with his inspiring aunts who lived in flat-roofed villas with Verner Panton and Eero Saarinen furniture that gave their nephew a lifelong passion for midcentury aesthetics-it’s one that Miuccia Prada shares. ![]() ![]() ![]() Simons was born in the town of Neerpelt in rural Belgium, “a village between cows and sheep” as he once told Vogue. “What matters for me is ideas, and the aesthetics are totally secondary,” Prada has declared, but those aesthetics have changed the way men and women have wanted to present themselves in the last three decades, and in Simons she has found an accomplished collaborator-Flemish cool to her Italian warmth, pragmatist to her gut-feeling fantasist-to challenge and inspire. The move is also a vote of confidence in the power of the creative imagination at a time when the bottom line dominates much of an industry obsessed with exponential growth and number crunching. And so today’s announcement that Raf Simons-innovative menswear designer, alum of Jil Sander, Christian Dior, and Calvin Klein-would be joining Prada as co-creative director, with the two famously opinionated personalities working together to reimagine the brand for the 2020s, seems like a masterstroke of innovative thinking. “When I was a girl,” Miuccia Prada confided to Vogue’s Sarah Mower in 2004, “I always wanted to be different, and before the others.” It is a desire that has guided Prada’s life at the creative helm of a multibillion-dollar global brand, one shaped by her protean talents and instincts and by her ability to reimagine what the future of fashion might look like. ![]()
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