The fitting room on Via Fogazzaro smells faintly of steam and sizing

The fitting room on Via Fogazzaro smells faintly of steam and sizing. Miuccia Prada stands to one side, arms crossed, watching a model turn in a navy polyester dress that cost perhaps forty lire to produce and will retail, come September 1996, for considerably more. The fabric clings where it should not, skims where convention says it must. The woman wearing it looks vaguely uncomfortable. This, one suspects, is the point.

Prada has never courted muses in the classical sense — no Bettina Graziani perched on a workroom table, no Inès de la Fressange signing exclusive contracts. What the house has cultivated instead is a series of collaborations, often unnamed, always consequential, with women who understand that beauty and discomfort can occupy the same silhouette. Three figures, across three decades, clarified what Prada means when it dresses a body that thinks.

Carla Sozzani and the Invention of Prada Woman

Before there was a Prada woman, there was Carla Sozzani — editor, gallerist, the elder sister Miuccia trusted to translate instinct into commerce. In the early Eighties, when the house was still synonymous with luggage, Sozzani was editing Vogue Italia and running a Milanese concept store that sold Comme des Garçons next to Shaker furniture. She understood, as few did then, that intellectual rigour could be seductive.

Miuccia showed her the nylon backpack in 1984. Sozzani bought six. Then sixty. The fabric was industrial, matte, the kind of thing one associated with military surplus or hospital scrubs. Sozzani wore hers to the Vogue offices, to dinners at Giacomo, to the Triennale. Within a season, the waiting list ran four months deep.

What Sozzani gave Prada was not her face — she has always preferred to remain behind the lens — but her vocabulary. She spoke of reduction, of removing ornament until only function and a very particular kind of wit remained. The nylon bag was not chic in the way a Kelly was chic; it was chic because it refused to perform chicness. Sozzani's endorsement signalled that this refusal was, in fact, a position.

The relationship was never formalised. Sozzani left Vogue in 1988, opened 10 Corso Como three years later, and continued to stock Prada alongside Balenciaga and Martin Margiela. She appeared in no campaigns. But walk through the Corso Como bookshop even now and you will find the same aesthetic grammar: austerity as a form of abundance, the cerebral rendered tactile. Prada's visual language, from the mint-green storefronts to the OMA-designed flagships, carries her fingerprints.

Amber Valletta and the Paradox of Minimalism

By 1995, Prada needed a face. Not in the traditional sense — Miuccia has always been allergic to the singular beauty — but a figure who could embody the house's central paradox: that minimalism, taken to its logical extreme, becomes a kind of maximalism.

Enter Amber Valletta. Tall, angular, American. She had walked for Versace and Valentino, done the supermodel turn in music videos and tabloids, but there was something in her carriage that resisted spectacle. Photographer Glen Luchford saw it first. He cast her for Prada's Spring/Summer 1996 campaign, shot in a Los Angeles parking garage under fluorescent light. Valletta wore that navy polyester dress, the one from the fitting room, and stared past the camera with an expression that read as either boredom or refusal. Possibly both.

The images were deliberately ugly. Harsh light, no retouching, a colour palette that recalled Eastern Bloc housing estates. Valletta's beauty was undeniable but presented without warmth, without the invitation that fashion advertising typically extends. The campaign was pilloried, then copied. Within two seasons, every European house was shooting in car parks and underpasses, chasing the same aesthetic of studied disaffection.

Valletta appeared in nine consecutive Prada campaigns between 1996 and 1998. She became shorthand for a particular kind of Prada woman: educated, sceptical, possibly depressed, certainly not interested in your approval. The clothes she wore — those nylon anoraks, the boxy jackets in surgical green, the kitten heels that made walking an exercise in controlled instability — were not designed to flatter. They were designed to signal that flattery was beside the point.

What made the collaboration work was Valletta's willingness to disappear into the concept. She gave interviews in which she confessed to not understanding the clothes, to feeling awkward in them, to preferring jeans. This honesty, rare in the Nineties, only deepened the association. Prada was not about comfort or ease. It was about the friction between the body and the garment, between beauty and its deliberate withholding.

Hunter Schafer and the Digital Uncanny

The house went quiet on muses for nearly two decades. Campaigns featured ensembles, not individuals. Then, in 2022, Prada cast Hunter Schafer — actor, model, trans woman — as the face of its fragrance campaign, and later in ready-to-wear imagery shot by David Sims.

Schafer's appeal to Prada is not difficult to parse. She is young, chronically online, fluent in the semiotics of gender as performance. Her face has the quality of certain Renaissance portraits: symmetrical to the point of strangeness, beautiful in a way that resists easy consumption. On screen, in Euphoria, she plays characters who use fashion as armour and anaesthetic. Off screen, she wears Prada with the same deliberate remove Valletta once did, as though the clothes are a language she is learning but has not yet mastered.

What distinguishes Schafer from earlier Prada women is her relationship to image. Sozzani worked in print, Valletta in the last gasp of analog advertising. Schafer exists in a visual economy where every appearance is immediately dissected, memed, and recirculated. Her Prada campaigns are designed for this fragmentation — close-ups of her face in clinical light, minimal styling, an aesthetic that reads as both futuristic and oddly nostalgic for the Nineties campaigns she is too young to remember.

Miuccia Prada, now in her mid-seventies and co-designing with Raf Simons, has spoken — carefully, in interviews with System and 032c — about fashion's relationship to the virtual. Schafer, who grew up on Tumblr and Instagram, embodies that tension. She is both image and person, muse and collaborator, a body that understands it will be consumed primarily as pixels.

The Through Line

Stand the three together — Sozzani in her nylon backpack, Valletta in that polyester dress, Schafer in whatever Prada and Simons have decided constitutes desirability this season — and a pattern emerges. Prada does not choose women who make the clothes easier to wear. It chooses women who make the difficulty legible, even compelling.

This is not, one should note, the same as choosing difficult women. All three are professionals, articulate and disciplined in their work. What they share is a willingness to let the garment remain strange, to resist the pressure to make Prada palatable. In an industry that increasingly conflates fashion with lifestyle, with aspiration made frictionless, this refusal has become Prada's signature.

Whether the house can maintain that position as it expands — more flagships, more collaborations, more pressure to speak to a customer who wants comfort and irony in equal measure — remains open. But for now, the muses hold the line. They wear the clothes as though they have not yet decided whether they like them. Which is, perhaps, the most Prada thing one can do.