Prada aujourd'hui : où en est la maison

The green nylon backpack sits in a vitrine at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, behind glass that costs more per square metre than most of the bags Miuccia Prada sold in 1985. It is faded now, the hardware dull, the strap frayed where thousands of shoulders wore it thin. A small placard notes the year, the material specification, nothing more. One suspects the object needs no further annotation. It has already rewritten the terms.

The question today is whether Prada—the house, the business, the 113-year-old Milanese institution—can do so again.

Pocone and Parachutes

Prada began, as most Italian houses did, in leather. Mario Prada opened a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913, selling English steamer trunks and handbags to the Milanese bourgeoisie. His granddaughter Miuccia, a PhD in political science and a former mime, inherited the business in 1978 with little apparent interest in handbags. What she had was an eye for the ordinary and a conviction that luxury need not announce itself.

The nylon came first. Pocone, a parachute-grade industrial textile, matte and anonymous. She used it for a backpack in 1984, then a tote, then a whole line of luggage that looked, to the trained eye of the time, like nothing at all. No logo beyond a small triangular plaque. No obvious craftsmanship to justify the price. Just a fabric that refused to age gracefully and a silhouette that borrowed from military surplus.

It sold because it didn't look like it was trying to sell. By the early Nineties, every editor in Milan carried one. The triangle became, almost by accident, one of the most recognised marks in fashion.

What followed was a decade of near-perfect pitch. Miuccia Prada understood that the intellectual class wanted to signal taste without vulgarity, and she gave them the tools: slip dresses in medical-grade nylon, cardigans with crystal brooches, shoes so ugly they circled back to chic. The shows were strange, often deliberately off-putting. The clothes worked anyway. By 2000, Prada was a house that mattered not because it flattered but because it thought.

The Raf Simons Era

In 2020, Miuccia Prada did something unusual for a founder still in command of her faculties: she hired a co-creative director. Raf Simons, formerly of Jil Sander, Dior, and Calvin Klein, joined as equal partner. The announcement surprised few in the industry—Simons had long been considered Miuccia's spiritual heir, a designer who prized intellect over decoration—but the structure itself was novel. Two creative directors, equal billing, no clear division of labour.

The first collection, shown in September 2020 via digital film, offered a thesis: uniform as identity, identity as performance. Models in flat shoes and austere tailoring moved through rooms lined with pastel felt. The clothes were restrained to the point of severity—narrow trousers, boxy jackets, shirts buttoned to the throat—but the staging suggested something more ambiguous. One read it as a dialogue, though it was never entirely clear who was speaking.

Four years in, the partnership has settled into a recognisable cadence. The shows are quieter than they were in the Nineties, less interested in provocation for its own sake. The silhouettes have narrowed. Colour appears in blocks—ochre, sage, a particular shade of grey-blue that recurs each season like a leitmotif. The accessories, historically Prada's commercial engine, have become more architectural: the Cleo, a soft half-moon with a single strap, sold briskly in 2021; the Galleria, a structured tote, continues to move in steady volume.

The critical response has been respectful, occasionally enthusiastic, rarely ecstatic. Simons brings rigour, a certain Teutonic precision that tempers Miuccia's more eccentric impulses. Whether this is a gain or a loss depends, as most things do at Prada, on one's tolerance for ambiguity.

The Numbers and the Narrative

Prada Group reported revenue of €4.7 billion in 2023, an increase of 17 percent year-on-year. Retail sales rose across all regions; Asia-Pacific, predictably, led growth. The Miu Miu division—Miuccia's younger, more overtly playful line—posted a 58 percent increase, driven largely by a single skirt: the low-slung, pleated mini that became, for reasons both explicable and not, the defining garment of 2023.

The skirt's success is worth examining. It is not, by any technical measure, a complicated piece of design. Pleats, a waistband, a hem that skims mid-thigh. What it offers is proportion—the way it sits on the hip, the slight bulk of the pleats against a flat stomach—and the permission to look, in a very specific way, young. Not teenage, but university-aged. Intelligent but not severe. The effect is knowing, almost anthropological, which is to say it is very Prada.

Prada itself, the main line, does not produce viral moments with the same frequency. The Cleo had its season; the Re-Edition nylon bags, reissues of Nineties styles, sell steadily to a customer base that remembers the originals. But the house is not chasing trends in the manner of Bottega Veneta's recent ascent or Loewe's craft-forward repositioning. It is, instead, maintaining.

This is not a criticism, though it can read as one. Prada has long operated at a remove from the fashion cycle's more hysterical rhythms. The risk is that remove can calcify into indifference.

What Remains

On a recent visit to the Prada boutique on avenue Montaigne, I watched a woman in her fifties examine a Galleria tote in black Saffiano leather. She opened it, checked the interior pockets, ran a thumb over the stitching at the handle join. She did not look at the price tag. After five minutes, she handed it to the sales associate and moved to the shoe wall.

The transaction—wordless, efficient, unsurprised—felt like a distillation of where Prada sits now. It is a house that no longer needs to explain itself to its core customer. The question is whether it can still surprise her.

Miuccia Prada is 75. Raf Simons is 56. The partnership, however long it lasts, represents a transitional moment, though Prada has been careful not to frame it as such. There is no succession plan on public record. The family retains control—Miuccia and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, hold 80 percent of shares—and has shown little inclination to sell. The Fondazione continues to mount ambitious exhibitions: Meriem Bennani, Michaël Borremans, a forthcoming survey of Brazilian modernism. The shows remain intellectually rigorous, commercially viable, and just strange enough to remind you who is in charge.

Whether this is enough—whether rigour and strangeness can sustain a house in an era that rewards spectacle and virality—is the question Prada faces now. The green nylon backpack, still behind glass in Milan, suggests one answer. It took a decade for the world to understand what Miuccia was doing. One suspects she is comfortable with that timeline.

The woman on avenue Montaigne left with the Galleria and a pair of slingbacks in patent leather. She did not ask for a bag.