## The Leather Goods Shop That Learned to Think

The Leather Goods Shop That Learned to Think

Miuccia Prada stands at the end of a runway in Milan, September 1988, as models file past in black nylon backpacks. The audience is confused. This is not what one wears to the opera. This is not what one wears anywhere that matters. But Prada has just bet the house on a fabric associated with parachutes and military kit, and within eighteen months, every editor in Europe will own one of these bags. The confusion, it turns out, was the point.

But we begin earlier, and with a different Prada altogether.

Fratelli Prada, 1913

Mario Prada opened a leather goods shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913, under the name Fratelli Prada — Prada Brothers, though his brother Martino appears to have played a largely decorative role. The shop sold English steamer trunks, handbags in walrus and crocodile, and small luxuries for the Milanese upper crust. Mario supplied the Italian royal family. He was, by all accounts, a fine craftsman and a man of pronounced opinions, one of which was that women had no place in business.

His daughter Luisa disagreed. She took over the company in 1958, kept it solvent through two decades of political unrest and economic stagnation, and passed it to her daughter, Miuccia, in 1978. By then Prada was a respected name in luggage, nothing more. It had perhaps a dozen employees. There was no ready-to-wear, no advertising, no ambition beyond the Milanese carriage trade.

Miuccia Prada — born Maria Bianchi, she adopted her mother's surname professionally — had spent the previous decade studying political science, performing mime at the Piccolo Teatro, and involving herself in the Italian Communist Party. She had a doctorate. She had no interest in handbags. She took the job, one suspects, because someone had to.

The Nylon Gambit

What she did have was a discomfort with the obvious. Luxury in the late seventies meant logo'd canvas, gilt hardware, status you could read from across a piazza. Prada's first significant act was to strip all of that away. In 1979 she introduced a line of black nylon bags — Pocono nylon, a technical fabric used by the Italian military — with minimal hardware and a small triangular logo in enamel. The bags were light. They were durable. They looked like nothing else in a luxury boutique.

They also didn't sell, at first. Nylon was cheap. Nylon was for rucksacks. But Prada's timing, accidental or otherwise, was impeccable. By the mid-eighties, a generation of women in Milan and New York had begun to reject the more-is-more aesthetic of the previous decade. They wanted something quieter, something that signalled taste rather than announcing wealth. The nylon backpack, priced at what was then an audacious sum for a fabric that cost almost nothing, became the uniform of that shift.

Miuccia married Patrizio Bertelli in 1987. Bertelli ran a Tuscan leather goods manufacturer and understood production in a way she did not. He became the house's CEO, and the partnership — equal parts creative and industrial — has endured for nearly four decades. One designs, the other builds the factories. It is, by fashion standards, an almost perversely functional marriage.

Ready-to-Wear, and the Ugly Dress

Prada's first women's ready-to-wear collection appeared in 1989. The pieces were severe, intellectual, and deeply unflattering by the standards of the time. Hemlines fell mid-calf. Colours ran to brown, grey, and a particular shade of medical-supply green. Silhouettes erased the waist. The models looked like librarians in a Mitteleuropean novel, and the fashion press was divided between fascination and bewilderment.

What Miuccia had done, intentionally or not, was to propose that fashion could be about ideas rather than seduction. Her references were art, architecture, politics — she cited the Bauhaus, the Italian Futurists, the aesthetics of early Soviet film. She made clothes that required a certain intellectual complicity from the wearer. You had to be in on the joke, or at least willing to entertain the possibility that there was one.

The so-called 'ugly chic' movement of the mid-nineties — brocade skirts worn with flat sandals, clashing prints, deliberately frumpy cardigans — was in large part Prada's doing. The house had discovered that bad taste, deployed with precision, could be more subversive than beauty. A collection in 1996 featured polyester prints that looked like motel upholstery. It sold out.

Miu Miu, and the Problem of Youth

In 1993 Prada launched a second line, Miu Miu, named after Miuccia's childhood nickname. The distinction between the two has never been entirely clear, even to those who work at the company. Prada is cerebral, Miu Miu is instinctive. Prada is for women who think, Miu Miu is for women who feel. The explanations multiply, none quite convincing.

What is clear is that Miu Miu allowed the house to explore a different register — younger, more playful, occasionally more vulgar. The clothes were shorter, brighter, less burdened by theory. A Miu Miu show might feature micro-miniskirts and platform Mary Janes, references to Catholic schoolgirls and Lolita fantasies, things that would sit uncomfortably in a mainline Prada collection. It became, over time, a laboratory for ideas that were too unruly for the parent house.

The Prada Group, and the Limits of Expansion

Bertelli spent much of the nineties acquiring other brands — Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Church's, Car Shoe — in an attempt to build a luxury conglomerate to rival LVMH and Kering. It did not go well. Prada's genius was in a very specific kind of intellectual provocation; it had no particular aptitude for managing other designers' visions. Jil Sander left her own house twice, citing creative differences. Helmut Lang walked away in 2005. By the time the group divested most of its acquisitions, it had burned through a considerable sum and learned a hard lesson about the limits of its own model.

Prada itself, meanwhile, continued to print money. The nylon bags remained bestsellers. The ready-to-wear, however wilfully perverse, had a devoted following. The house went public in Hong Kong in 2011, raising $2.5 billion, though the listing has since been criticised for overvaluing the company in a market that was already cooling.

What Remains

Miuccia Prada is now in her mid-seventies. In 2020 she appointed Raf Simons as co-creative director, a decision that surprised much of the industry — Prada had never shared the role, and Simons's aesthetic, while intellectual, was not obviously aligned with hers. The partnership has produced collections that feel like a conversation between two designers who respect each other but do not always agree. Some shows are more Prada, some more Simons. The tension, so far, has been productive.

What has not changed is the house's fundamental seriousness. Prada still makes clothes that ask questions rather than answer them. It still prizes the awkward over the elegant, the thought over the gesture. It still believes, against considerable evidence to the contrary, that fashion can be a form of discourse.

Whether that belief will survive the next generation is unclear. The Prada Group is now run by Lorenzo Bertelli, Miuccia and Patrizio's son, who has spent the past decade learning the business from the inside. He is, by all accounts, capable. But capability is not vision, and vision is what built this house in the first place.

One returns, in the end, to that nylon backpack. It was an absurd object — a luxury good made from a cheap fabric, priced for the wealthy, designed for no one in particular. It succeeded because it proposed a different way of thinking about what luxury might be. Not louder, but quieter. Not more, but less. Prada's trick, for four decades, has been to convince a certain kind of customer that less is harder to do, and therefore worth more.

Whether that trick still works in 2025 is a question the house is asking itself, quietly, every season.