The nylon backpack sits in a vitrine at the Fondazione Prada, behind glass as if it were a Morandi

The nylon backpack sits in a vitrine at the Fondazione Prada, behind glass as if it were a Morandi. Which, in a sense, it is. Pocono nylon, industrial webbing, a triangular enamelled plaque. Nineteen eighty-four. The year Miuccia Prada took a material associated with parachutes and military surplus and made it, somehow, desirable. Not in spite of its ordinariness, but because of it.

That gesture — the refusal of obvious luxury, the elevation of the mundane through precision and context — remains the house's organising principle. Forty years on, Prada is still the maison that asks you to reconsider what you thought you wanted.

Fondamenta

The business began in 1913 as Fratelli Prada, a leather-goods atelier in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Trunks, handbags, accessories for the Milanese bourgeoisie. Solid work, discreet. Miuccia Prada, granddaughter of the founder, inherited the company in 1978 with no particular interest in fashion. She had a doctorate in political science. She had worked in mime theatre. The handbag trade was not, one suspects, her first ambition.

But she approached it as a problem of ideas, not product. The nylon bags arrived in 1984, priced high and branded minimally. They sold poorly at first. Then they didn't. By the early nineties, that black nylon backpack had become a signifier — not of wealth, exactly, but of a certain intellectual remove from wealth. The sort of bag carried by architects, gallerists, women who worked in publishing. Prada had found its constituency.

The ready-to-wear followed in 1988. Here, too, the logic was inversion. Miuccia Prada showed skirts that looked like they'd been made from upholstery samples. Colours that clashed on purpose. Silhouettes that refused the body's usual points of emphasis. Ugly, some said. Exactly, she seemed to reply. The shows became events not because they were beautiful — though they often were, in a slant light — but because they made you think.

The Raf years, and what they clarified

When Raf Simons joined as co-creative director in 2020, the fashion press reached for the word 'unprecedented'. Two designers of that stature, working in tandem, presenting collections under a shared credit. But the structure clarified something that had always been true: Prada is not one vision. It is a conversation.

Simons brought his own vocabulary — the clean line, the almost-severe tailoring, a preoccupation with youth as both subject and audience. Miuccia Prada brought four decades of intellectual restlessness. The collections that followed felt less like compromise than call-and-response. A Simons coat, rendered in a Prada print. A Prada silhouette, sharpened to a Simons edge. The autumn 2023 show, for instance, opened with sober suiting in charcoal and ink, then pivid into embellished knits that looked like they'd been pulled from a grandmother's closet and remade by someone with opinions about Surrealism.

The partnership has steadied the house creatively. Commercially, too. Prada Group reported revenues of €4.7 billion in 2023, a 17 percent increase year-on-year. Not all of that is Prada proper — the group includes Miu Miu, Church's, Car Shoe — but the flagship label remains the centre of gravity. Miu Miu, notably, has had its own renaissance, driven by the viral success of the low-slung skirt and a younger customer base. But that's a separate conversation.

What sells, and what that tells us

Walk into the Prada boutique on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and you'll see the Galleria bag in a dozen iterations. Saffiano leather, structured, top-handled. It is, by the house's standards, almost conventional. It sells. The Re-Edition 2005, a reissue of a nylon shoulder bag from two decades prior, also sells. So do the Symbole sunglasses, the logo-jacquard knits, the nylon bucket hats that became a pandemic-era uniform.

This is the tension Prada navigates better than most: how to be intellectually serious and commercially viable at once. The runway collections are often challenging — prints that shouldn't work, proportions that require a second look. But the floor models are edited, wearable, and priced to move. A black nylon tote: €1,200. A Galleria in saffiano: €2,850. A cashmere crewneck with a discreet triangle logo: €890. Not entry-level, but not Hermès either.

The brand's image, meanwhile, has bifurcated. On one hand, there's the Prada worn by Cate Blanchett at Cannes or Hunter Schafer at the Met Gala — avant-garde, referential, the sort of thing that gets written about. On the other, there's the Prada worn by finance professionals in Hong Kong or Milan, where the logo is a handshake, a way of signalling you know the codes without shouting them.

Both customers are real. Both matter. The trick is not alienating one while courting the other.

The Fondazione, and the long game

Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, opened the Fondazione Prada in 2015. A former distillery in southern Milan, renovated by Rem Koolhaas. It shows contemporary art, hosts film screenings, publishes books. It is not a brand exercise, or not only. It is a statement of intent: Prada is interested in culture, not just commerce.

This matters more than it might seem. In an industry increasingly driven by quarterly earnings and Instagram reach, Prada has maintained a longer view. The collections are not designed to go viral, though sometimes they do. They are designed to be considered, to accumulate meaning over time. A Prada piece from 1995 still looks like Prada. It has not aged into kitsch or nostalgia. It simply is.

This is the house's great strength and, occasionally, its limitation. Prada does not chase trends. It sets them, or it ignores them. When logomania returned in the late 2010s, Prada leaned in — but on its own terms, with a wink and a degree of remove. When quiet luxury became the discourse, Prada shrugged. It had been doing quiet luxury since 1984.

Now

The autumn 2024 collections showed in February. Simons and Miuccia Prada sent out coats in camel and grey, skirts with asymmetric hems, knits with geometric intarsia. Wearable, yes. But also strange in small ways — a sleeve that ended too soon, a collar that sat too high. The sort of details that don't photograph well but make sense on the body.

Backstage, Miuccia Prada told a journalist that the collection was about "normal clothes, but not normal." Which is as good a summary of the Prada project as any. The house is not interested in disruption for its own sake, nor in playing it safe. It wants to make you look twice at something you thought you understood.

Whether that remains a viable strategy in 2025 is an open question. The luxury market is consolidating. Consumers are younger, more digital, less patient with abstraction. Prada's bet is that there will always be a customer who wants to think, not just buy.

One hopes they're right. But hope, as Miuccia Prada might say, is not a strategy. Craft is. Precision is. The ability to make a nylon backpack feel, against all logic, like an idea worth carrying.