There is a nylon backpack, triangular logo affixed, sitting in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art

There is a nylon backpack, triangular logo affixed, sitting in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. One can debate whether it belongs there — plenty have — but the fact remains: Prada convinced MoMA that industrial fabric, heat-sealed and sewn into a carrier for books and wallets, merited archival status. That tells you something about the house's particular gift, which is not for beauty in the conventional sense but for making the unconventional legible, even covetable, on a mass scale.

Prada does not seduce. It persuades.

The Founding Logic

Mario Prada opened a leather goods shop in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913. The work was fine — trunks, handbags, small accessories in walrus and crocodile — but unremarkable within the broader landscape of Italian craft. The house remained a regional concern, respected but minor, until Mario's granddaughter Miuccia took the reins in 1978.

Miuccia Prada, a PhD in political science and a former mime, arrived with no formal training in design. She had, however, an instinct for disruption. In 1984, she introduced a line of backpacks and totes made from pocone, a military-spec nylon used in army tents. The fabric was matte, anonymous, vaguely industrial. It did not telegraph wealth. It did not patinate. It simply resisted — water, wear, the entire language of luxury as it had been spoken to that point.

The collection succeeded not in spite of its austerity but because of it. Prada understood, earlier than most, that a certain class of customer no longer wished to announce their means. They preferred to signal taste, education, a kind of knowing restraint. Nylon, in that context, became a code. The backpack sold briskly. Within a decade, it was canonical.

The Intellectual Turn

By the mid-nineties, Prada had moved decisively into ready-to-wear. The clothes bore little resemblance to what was then dominating runways — no bombast, no obvious sex appeal, no nostalgic reference to a mythic past. Instead, Miuccia Prada offered garments that felt oddly off: hemlines that ended at the shin rather than the knee, prints that clashed rather than coordinated, silhouettes that added volume where convention demanded sleekness.

The Fall 1996 collection remains instructive. Models walked in brown and mustard, colours more often associated with upholstery than evening wear. Skirts were pleated and knee-length, worn with cardigans that buttoned asymmetrically. The overall effect was prim, even dowdy, until one registered the precision of the cut, the deliberate strangeness of the proportions. Prada was not interested in making women look powerful in the shoulder-padded, Dynasty sense. She was interested in making them look intelligent, which is a different project entirely.

Critics called it "ugly chic," a term Prada never embraced but never fully rejected. The clothes sold regardless. By 1998, the house had acquired Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and a stake in several other labels, positioning itself as the intellectual anchor of a new luxury conglomerate. The strategy was ambitious, arguably overextended, and ultimately unsustainable — most of those acquisitions were later unwound — but it clarified Prada's self-conception. This was a house that saw itself not as a purveyor of beautiful things but as a curator of ideas, some of which happened to take the form of handbags and coats.

The Raf Simons Era and Its Discontents

In 2020, Miuccia Prada invited Raf Simons to join her as co-creative director. The appointment surprised no one and unsettled nearly everyone. Simons, formerly of Jil Sander, Dior, and Calvin Klein, brought his own vocabulary — youth culture, subcultural reference, a tendency toward the poetic — into a house already dense with signifiers. The question was whether two authorial voices could coexist without one overwhelming the other.

The early collections suggested a negotiation rather than a synthesis. Spring 2021, their debut, featured Simons' signature cropped tailoring alongside Miuccia's fondness for embellishment and colour. The pieces did not quite cohere, but they did not need to. The tension was, in a sense, the point. Prada has always thrived on ambiguity, on refusing to resolve into a single, easily digestible identity.

By Fall 2023, the collaboration had settled into a rhythm. The clothes were quieter, more assured. Tailoring remained central — blazers with exaggerated lapels, trousers cut high and wide — but the palette had softened. Beige, grey, muted olive. The accessories, too, reflected a kind of restraint: small leather goods in grainy calfskin, the hardware minimal, the logos discreet to the point of near-invisibility.

One suspects Simons has pushed Prada toward a kind of elegance the house historically resisted. Whether that constitutes progress or dilution depends on where one stands. The clothes are easier to wear, certainly, and easier to sell. They are also, arguably, less strange, which is to say less Prada in the original sense. The house has always been at its best when it refuses to accommodate, when it insists on its own logic even at the expense of broad appeal. The Simons years have been commercially successful — revenue has climbed steadily — but the aesthetic has softened in ways that feel, to some observers, like a concession.

Where the House Stands

Prada today occupies an unusual position. It is neither the most profitable house — that title belongs to Hermès or Louis Vuitton, depending on the quarter — nor the most culturally dominant, a mantle currently held by Bottega Veneta or perhaps Loewe. What Prada retains is a kind of intellectual authority, a sense that its choices matter not just commercially but conceptually.

The house still produces nylon backpacks, now in dozens of colourways and configurations. It still stages shows that feel more like propositions than presentations, collections that ask questions rather than provide answers. The Fondazione Prada, the contemporary art space Miuccia and her husband Patrizio Bertelli established in Milan, continues to mount exhibitions that have little to do with fashion and everything to do with how the house wishes to be understood: as a patron of thought, not merely of craft.

And yet. One walks into a Prada boutique today and finds, alongside the cerebral pieces and the archival reissues, a great many items that simply look expensive in a straightforward way. Saffiano leather totes. Logo-jacquard knitwear. Re-editions of the 1990s nylon bags, now priced at €1,200 and up. The house has not abandoned its founding principles so much as learned to hedge them, to offer both the strange and the safe, the conceptual and the commercial, in roughly equal measure.

Whether that constitutes maturity or compromise is not for me to say. What seems clear is that Prada, more than most houses, understands that luxury is not a stable category. It shifts with each generation, each economic cycle, each recalibration of what signals taste versus what signals wealth. Miuccia Prada built a house on that insight, and it has sustained her for four decades.

There is still that backpack in MoMA, of course. Black nylon, triangular logo, stitching precise as a theorem. It sits in a vitrine on the third floor, near the design collection, and if you stand there long enough you will see visitors pause, register the object, and move on. Some smile. Some frown. No one, in my experience, looks indifferent. Which is perhaps the point.