The fitting room at Prada's Via Fogazzaro headquarters smells faintly of steam and wool

The fitting room at Prada's Via Fogazzaro headquarters smells faintly of steam and wool. Miuccia Prada stands beside a dress form draped in a half-finished coat — charcoal mohair, the sleeves still pinned — and gestures at the shoulder line. Not quite. The seamstress nods, makes a chalk mark. Prada steps back, arms crossed, and studies the thing for a beat longer than feels comfortable. Then she moves on.

This is the rhythm. Thirty-six years as creative director, and she still works like this: incremental, empirical, resistant to the declarative statement. The coat will be adjusted. It will reappear in the next round of fittings. It may not make the collection at all.

The Doctorate She Didn't Use

Prada came to fashion sideways. She studied political science at the University of Milan, earned a doctorate, spent the early seventies involved in the Communist Party and the women's movement. Her grandfather, Mario Prada, had founded the house in 1913 — leather goods, travel trunks, a small atelier on Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. By the time Miuccia inherited the business in 1978, it was profitable but minor, known mostly for a certain type of client who valued discreet facture over flash.

She had no formal training in design. What she had was a point of view, and it was oblique. Her first major intervention was a line of black nylon backpacks, introduced in 1984. Pocono nylon, to be precise — a material developed for military parachutes, matte and near-weightless. The bags had no logo, just a small triangular plaque stamped with the Prada name. They sold.

The nylon was a signal, though it took the industry a moment to parse it. Prada was not interested in luxury as theatre. She was interested in luxury as thought experiment. What happens when you strip away the obvious markers — the monogram, the gilt hardware, the supple calf — and replace them with something industrial, even ugly? What remains?

The Pivot: Patrizio Bertelli and the Expansion

In 1977, before she took over the house, Prada met Patrizio Bertelli, a Tuscan entrepreneur who ran a leather goods company. They married in 1987. Bertelli became CEO; Prada remained creative director. The partnership was, by most accounts, combustible and effective. Bertelli handled production, licensing, retail expansion. Prada designed.

The first ready-to-wear collection appeared in 1988. It was shown in Milan, not Paris. The palette was brown, grey, taupe — colours that photographs poorly. The silhouettes were deliberately ungainly: dropped waists, boxy jackets, skirts that sat just wrong on the hip. Vogue ran a small notice. The collection sold out.

By the mid-nineties, Prada had become the reference point for a certain kind of intellectual minimalism. The SS96 collection — those amber and rust slip dresses, worn with chunky-soled Mary Janes — landed at a moment when the industry was lurching between grunge's last gasp and the approach of Y2K maximalism. Prada offered a third option: cerebral, austere, faintly perverse. The silhouettes were simple, but the fabrications were strange. Nylon again, but also rubberised cotton, technical mesh, synthetics that moved like silk but looked like plastic.

She was not trying to be liked. In a 1998 interview with The New Yorker, she said: "I don't believe in good taste." The line has been quoted often enough to feel like shorthand, but the context matters. She was talking about the tyranny of received ideas, the assumption that luxury must be beautiful in a way everyone agrees upon. Prada's work argued otherwise.

The Signature: Ugly-Chic and the Refusal to Repeat

If there is a through-line in Prada's three-and-a-half decades, it is contradiction. She makes clothes that are both austere and ornate, minimal and fussy, intellectual and commercial. The flame-print skirts from SS11. The cartoon-animal appliqués from SS13. The Frankenstein platform sandals from SS13, which were neither elegant nor comfortable but sold regardless.

Ugly-chic is the term that stuck, though Prada herself has never used it. What she has said, repeatedly, is that she is bored by consistency. Each collection begins from a different premise. Sometimes it is a fabric — the industrial felts from AW07, the brocades from AW12. Sometimes it is a reference: the American West, Soviet propaganda posters, 1950s domestic interiors. The results are rarely predictable.

The bags, meanwhile, remain the house's commercial engine. The Galleria, introduced in 2007, is structured Saffiano leather, top-handled, discreet. The Cahier, from 2016, is softer, with a jewelled clasp that nods to antique bookbinding. Both are recognisably Prada — which is to say, they look like nothing else.

Her approach to logomania has been strategic. The nylon backpack's triangular plaque became, over time, one of fashion's quietest status symbols. In the early 2000s, when monogramming was ubiquitous, Prada leaned into it with the Tessuto line — nylon bags stamped with repeat logos. Then she pulled back. The logo appears and recedes, season to season, never quite disappearing.

Raf Simons and the Question of Succession

In 2020, Prada appointed Raf Simons as co-creative director. The announcement surprised no one and clarified nothing. Simons, formerly of Jil Sander, Dior, and Calvin Klein, had built his reputation on a different kind of minimalism — cleaner, more austere, less interested in the decorative swerve. How the two would work together was unclear.

The first co-designed collection, AW20, was shown in February 2020, days before Milan went into lockdown. It was precise, almost severe: tailored coats in camel and navy, narrow trousers, shearling-lined parkas. The Prada codes were there — nylon, the triangle plaque, a certain deliberate awkwardness in the proportions — but filtered through Simons's rigour. The clothes felt like a conversation between two people who do not need to agree.

Since then, the partnership has settled into a rhythm. Prada still leads the fittings, still makes the final calls. Simons contributes ideas, shapes the menswear, pushes the tailoring. The collections are quieter than Prada's solo work, less prone to the sudden left turn. Whether that is a loss or a refinement depends on whom you ask.

What Remains

Prada turns seventy-five this year. She has no apparent interest in retirement. The house is profitable, independently held, and still headquartered in Milan. The next generation — her sons, Lorenzo Bertelli in particular — are involved in the business, though not in design.

What she has built is not a legacy in the traditional sense. There is no signature silhouette, no house code that repeats season after season. What there is, instead, is a method: start with a question, resist the easy answer, make the thing anyway. The coat in the fitting room may not work. It will be adjusted, or scrapped, or shown and ignored. Prada will move on to the next question.

One suspects she prefers it that way.