## The Leather-Goods Concern That Learned to Think

The Leather-Goods Concern That Learned to Think

In the autumn of 1913, Mario Prada opened a shop at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a vaulted arcade in central Milan. The trade was leather goods and imported novelties — steamer trunks, valises, English picnic sets. The clientele: Milanese aristocracy, who travelled often and spent accordingly. By all accounts, Mario was a competent craftsman and a shrewd merchant. He was also convinced that women had no place in business, a position that would prove, in hindsight, unfortunate for his legacy.

When he died in 1958, his daughter Luisa took over. She ran the house quietly for two decades, maintaining its reputation for well-made luggage and handbags while the fashion industry around her began to industrialise. In 1978, facing the question of succession and finding her own daughters uninterested, she handed the concern to her youngest, Miuccia, a woman who had spent the previous decade studying for a PhD in political science and performing mime in small theatres. Miuccia accepted, one suspects, out of duty rather than passion. She had no training in fashion. She did, however, have opinions.

Her first collection, launched in 1985, was a line of black nylon backpacks. The material — pocono, a military-grade weave used for parachutes — was lightweight, durable, and, crucially, cheap. Luxury houses did not, at that time, work in nylon. They worked in leather, preferably exotic. Miuccia's choice read, to the industry, as either provocation or miscalculation. It turned out to be neither. The bags sold quietly at first, then with gathering momentum. By the early nineties, the triangular enamel logo affixed to each piece had become a cipher for a particular kind of taste: intellectual, ironic, disinclined toward ostentation.

In 1989, Miuccia showed her first ready-to-wear collection. The palette was muted — greys, browns, ochres. The silhouettes were deliberately frumpy: below-the-knee skirts, boxy jackets, cardigans that seemed lifted from a maiden aunt's wardrobe. She showed them on models who looked, by the standards of the time, unglamorous. The front row was baffled. The press was divided. But a certain customer — the sort who read theory, who had studied architecture or semiotics, who mistrusted the obvious — recognised something. Prada, it seemed, was not interested in making women look beautiful. It was interested in making them look intelligent.

This was not, strictly speaking, new. Yves Saint Laurent had put women in tuxedos two decades earlier. But Saint Laurent's vision was about power through glamour. Miuccia's was about power through refusal. Refusal of cleavage, of waist definition, of the colour red. Her collections felt like arguments, footnoted in fabric. A dress might reference a Flemish painting, or a laboratory coat, or both at once. The effect was destabilising. One could not simply wear Prada. One had to think about it first.

In 1992, a secondary line appeared: Miu Miu, named after Miuccia's childhood nickname. If Prada was the argument, Miu Miu was the aside — younger, more capricious, prone to sudden enthusiasms. Where Prada dealt in restraint, Miu Miu played with girlishness, though always with a faint undertow of unease. A floral print might be slightly too saturated. A cardigan slightly too cropped. The collections felt less like youth and more like the memory of it, filtered through ambivalence.

By the mid-nineties, Prada had become the house that other designers referenced when they wanted to signal seriousness. Miuccia's influence was evident in the work of Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Martin Margiela — designers who shared her distrust of decoration and her faith in the intelligence of the wearer. The house expanded: menswear in 1993, a flagship in New York, a sport line that no one quite understood at the time but which prefigured the athleisure wave by a decade. In 1999, Prada acquired stakes in Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and Church's, assembling what looked, on paper, like an empire of minimalism. Most of those investments would later be divested at a loss, a reminder that vision in design does not always translate to vision in finance.

Throughout, Miuccia worked alongside Patrizio Bertelli, whom she married in 1987. Bertelli, a Tuscan entrepreneur with a background in leather manufacturing, handled operations while Miuccia handled design. The arrangement was functional, if not romantic in the conventional sense. In interviews — and there have been many — Miuccia has described the relationship as a partnership of opposites: she the intellectual, he the pragmatist. Whether this is accurate or simply useful is difficult to say.

What remains of the original concern? Remarkably little, in material terms. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II boutique still operates, though it now stocks ready-to-wear and accessories rather than steamer trunks. The family structure persists: Miuccia remains co-creative director, a title she has shared since 2020 with Raf Simons, the Belgian designer known for his own cerebral approach to fashion. The pairing was unexpected, though perhaps it shouldn't have been. Both designers traffic in the same vocabulary of restraint and reference. Both mistrust the easy gesture.

The Spring 2025 collection, their fifth together, featured narrow skirts in industrial felt, shirts with asymmetric plackets, and a recurring motif of exposed seams. It was, in other words, recognisably Prada: cerebral, slightly austere, resistant to summary. Whether the Simons collaboration represents a genuine evolution or simply a restatement of existing principles is a question the house has not yet answered. One suspects Miuccia prefers it that way.

In a 2014 conversation with Vanity Fair, she remarked that fashion, for her, had always been a way of thinking rather than a way of dressing. The comment is telling. Most designers speak of beauty, or desire, or the body. Miuccia speaks of ideas. Whether those ideas can survive her departure — she is now seventy-five — is the question facing Prada as it moves into its second century. The house has outlasted its founder's prejudices, its second generation's ambivalence, and several cycles of critical favour. What it has not yet done is prove it can function without the woman who taught it to think.