The fitting room on the fourth floor of Miu Miu's Milanese headquarters smells faintly of steam and sizing

The fitting room on the fourth floor of Miu Miu's Milanese headquarters smells faintly of steam and sizing. Miuccia Prada stands beside a rail of skirts — micro-mini, pleated, structured in a way that suggests school uniform crossed with something vaguely subversive. She adjusts one hemline with her thumb and forefinger, tilts her head, says nothing. The model shifts weight. Prada steps back, considers, then gestures for the next look. This is not theatre. It is calibration.

She has been calibrating for nearly four decades now, first at Prada, then — from 1993 — at Miu Miu, the house that bears her childhood nickname and functions, in her own words, as a space to experiment without the weight of institutional expectation. That the experiment has become an institution in its own right is one of fashion's stranger ironies.

The formation

Miuccia Prada did not begin in fashion. She began in political science, then mime, then the Italian Communist Party. Her doctorate from the University of Milan addressed women's rights. She joined the family business — a Milanese leather-goods atelier founded by her grandfather in 1913 — in 1978, not out of passion but pragmatism. The company was struggling. Someone had to step in.

What followed was not a smooth ascent. Prada spent the late Seventies and early Eighties learning the trade from the ground up: sourcing, production, the mechanics of a handbag's construction. She married Patrizio Bertelli, a Tuscan businessman with a background in luxury manufacturing, in 1987. He took operations; she took design. The division of labour was clean, unsentimental, effective.

Her first major success came in 1985 with a nylon backpack — Pocono nylon, to be precise, a material used for military tarpaulins. It was light, durable, and resolutely unglamorous. Prada added a small triangular logo plaque in enamelled metal. The bag became a cult object, then a commercial one. By the early Nineties, Prada was no longer a Milanese curiosity. It was a force.

Miu Miu arrived two years later, in 1993, as a kind of shadow project. Prada has described it, in various interviews, as her "little sister," a place to test ideas that felt too raw or too personal for the main line. The name itself — a family diminutive, the kind of thing an Italian grandmother might use — signals intimacy. The clothes, however, are rarely soft.

The signature

If Prada is about reduction, Miu Miu is about contradiction. A cardigan worn over nothing. A ballet flat with a crystal buckle the size of a fist. A skirt so short it becomes a provocation, then a uniform, then — somehow — both at once. Prada has always been drawn to the tension between girlishness and intellect, naïveté and knowingness. At Miu Miu, she lets that tension sit unresolved.

The house's aesthetic is harder to pin down than Prada's, and that appears to be the point. Collections veer from Sixties mod to Seventies glam to something that looks like a teenager's wardrobe raided by a stylist with a doctorate. The through-line is not a look but a posture: clever, slightly perverse, alert to the absurdities of femininity as a performance.

Consider the fall 2022 collection, which featured micro-minis paired with oversized outerwear and knee-high socks. The silhouette was schoolgirl, but the fabrics — wool crepe, duchesse satin, shearling — were decidedly adult. The collection became a commercial juggernaut. By mid-2023, Miu Miu's sales were outpacing Prada's in several key markets, a reversal that surprised even the company's own executives.

The skirt, in particular, became a phenomenon. It was copied, memed, worn by celebrities who would not normally touch anything so overt. Prada, characteristically, seemed unmoved by the attention. In a brief exchange with The Financial Times that autumn, she noted that the skirt's proportions had been in her vocabulary for years. The fact that it resonated now, she suggested, said more about the moment than about the garment.

The pivot

Prada's relationship to her own work has always been ambivalent. She has described fashion, at various points, as trivial, ridiculous, and politically suspect. She has also described it as one of the few industries where women can wield real power. The contradiction does not trouble her. If anything, it seems to fuel the work.

In 2020, she made a decision that felt, to many observers, like a retreat. She appointed Raf Simons as co-creative director of Prada, sharing a role she had held alone for more than thirty years. The move was read, variously, as succession planning, as a hedge against creative fatigue, as a way to inject new energy into a house that had begun to feel overly cerebral.

Simons brought his own vocabulary — youth culture, subculture, a fascination with uniforms and codes — but the collaboration has been less a merger than a conversation. The collections since 2020 have felt looser, more open to accident. Whether that is Simons's influence or simply Prada allowing herself more latitude is unclear. Likely it is both.

Miu Miu, meanwhile, remains hers alone. There is no co-director, no succession plan, no public talk of a handover. The house continues to function as her testing ground, the place where she can be most herself — which is to say, most contradictory.

What remains

At seventy-five, Prada shows no sign of stepping back. She continues to work at a pace that would exhaust someone half her age: two major collections for Prada, two for Miu Miu, plus pre-collections, collaborations, and the occasional costume-design project. She still attends fittings, still adjusts hemlines with her thumb and forefinger, still says very little in public.

The question of legacy — what Miu Miu will become after her, whether it can survive as a distinct entity or will fold back into Prada — is one she has not addressed in any meaningful way. Perhaps she does not need to. The house exists, for now, as an extension of her particular way of seeing: intelligent, sceptical, alive to the strangeness of women's lives under late capitalism.

In the spring 2024 collection, she showed a series of coats — oversized, slightly frumpy, the kind of thing one might find in a vintage shop in Bologna. They were worn over slips, over nothing, over trousers that pooled at the ankle. The models looked like they had dressed in the dark, or in a hurry, or with a very specific idea of what constituted elegance. Which is to say, they looked like Miuccia Prada's idea of a woman: complicated, unresolved, and entirely herself.