Prada aujourd'hui : où en est la maison

The fall 2024 show opened with a coat — charcoal wool, knee-length, cut close but not severe, with a single button at the collarbone and sleeves that stopped two centimetres short of the wrist. Unremarkable, until the model pivoted and the lining flashed: a violent orange nylon, the kind one associates with survival vests or climbing harnesses. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have been co-directing the house since 2020, and this coat — bourgeois shell, technical core — might serve as their manifesto in miniature.

The question one hears with increasing frequency, from buyers and editors alike, is not whether Prada remains relevant. It does. The question is what, precisely, the house now stands for, and whether its current direction represents evolution or a kind of elegant drift.

Fondations

Mario Prada opened a leather-goods shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913. His granddaughter, Miuccia, trained as a mime, earned a doctorate in political science, and joined the family business in 1978 with no particular interest in fashion. She introduced a black nylon backpack in 1984 — industrial material, military hardware, no visible logo — and the thing sold in a way that baffled the trade. By 1989 she was showing ready-to-wear. The first collection featured brown and grey and a certain calculated dowdiness that read, to those paying attention, as subversion.

What Miuccia Prada understood, and what set her apart from the logo-driven houses of the eighties and nineties, was that luxury could be intellectual. A Prada piece did not announce itself. It required a second look, a recognition of proportion or fabric or the way a seam refused to behave. The brand became, in the words of one longtime observer, "fashion for people who think about fashion."

The nineties and early aughts were the house's most creatively fertile period. Collections oscillated between austere and ornate, between nylon and silk faille, between references to Soviet propaganda posters and nineteenth-century portraiture. Prada acquired Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and a stake in Fendi. The Fondazione Prada opened in Milan in 1993, mounting exhibitions that had little to do with selling handbags and everything to do with establishing the brand as a patron of difficult art. Revenue grew steadily. By 2000, Prada was not merely a maison but a cultural apparatus.

Le moment actuel

Raf Simons arrived in February 2020, weeks before the pandemic shuttered the world. The appointment made a certain sense: Simons had spent two decades interrogating youth culture and bourgeois codes, first at his own label, then at Jil Sander, Dior, and Calvin Klein. He and Miuccia Prada share an affinity for contradiction — pretty things rendered strange, severe things softened at the edges. Their first co-designed collection, shown digitally in September 2020, leaned hard into that overlap: pastel coats with exaggerated shoulders, nylon bombers worn over satin slip skirts, loafers with lug soles.

Four years in, the collaboration has settled into a recognisable rhythm. Collections toggle between masculine tailoring and delicate, almost girlish silhouettes. Nylon remains a constant, as do references to uniforms — military, academic, service-industry. The colour palette skews toward muted tones punctuated by bursts of acid yellow or electric blue. There is craft here, certainly: the atelier produces pieces of considerable facture, and the shows are staged with the kind of budget that allows for custom-built environments and live orchestras.

Yet something about the work feels provisional. One suspects this is intentional — Prada and Simons seem allergic to the declarative statement, preferring instead to propose and revise and propose again. But the effect, over time, is a lack of anchor. Where Miuccia Prada's solo collections often felt like arguments, the co-designed work reads more as a series of well-executed sketches. Beautiful, yes. Coherent, less so.

The accessories tell a different story. The Galleria bag, reissued in 2007 and refined steadily since, remains one of the house's most consequential commercial products. Structured Saffiano leather, gold-plated triangle logo, a shape that borrows from a doctor's satchel. It sells. The Re-Edition 2005 nylon bag — a revival of a mid-aughts style — became an unexpected hit during the pandemic, particularly among younger buyers drawn to its relative accessibility and the semiotics of that nylon. Prada has leaned into this: the nylon line now includes everything from bucket hats to phone pouches, all bearing the enamelled triangle.

One notes, too, the increasing prominence of Miu Miu, Prada's younger-sibling label. Under Miuccia Prada's sole direction, Miu Miu has become the house's experimental edge — more playful, more overtly sexual, more willing to court the kind of virality that the main line seems to regard with suspicion. The micro mini skirt that dominated spring 2022 became one of the year's defining garments, copied widely and worn by a demographic that might never consider a Prada coat. Revenue for Miu Miu grew forty per cent in 2023. Prada itself grew twelve per cent. The implication is clear.

Image et commerce

Prada Group reported revenue of €4.7 billion in 2023, an increase driven largely by leather goods and the Asia-Pacific market. The house operates 635 directly owned stores worldwide. It acquired a controlling stake in Miu Miu's distribution in recent years, consolidating control. These are the figures of a healthy luxury conglomerate, not a house in crisis.

But revenue growth and cultural primacy do not always align. Prada's advertising campaigns, shot by photographers including Willy Vanderperre and David Sims, are handsomely produced and largely forgettable. The casting skews toward established faces — Hunter Schafer, Emma Corrin, Letitia Wright — rather than the kind of unexpected choices that once defined the brand's image-making. The result is polish without provocation.

The Fondazione continues to mount ambitious exhibitions — Meriem Bennani's video installations, Michaël Borremans's paintings, a retrospective of Prada's own archive — but the connection between the foundation's program and the runway collections feels increasingly abstract. One might argue this is the point: that the foundation exists to signal seriousness rather than to sell product. But the gap between art-world credibility and fashion-world impact has widened.

Meanwhile, competitors have sharpened their positions. Bottega Veneta, under Matthieu Blazy, has claimed the territory Prada once owned: intellectual luxury, craft-driven, resistant to hype. Loewe, under Jonathan Anderson, offers a similar proposition with a more overt embrace of the art world. Prada, by contrast, feels as though it is hedging — too considered to chase trends, too cautious to lead.

Où en sommes-nous

On balance, Prada in 2024 is a house in transition, though to what remains unclear. The Simons partnership has not failed, but neither has it produced the kind of defining work that reshapes the conversation. The accessories business is strong. The brand retains its reputation for intelligence and craft. But intelligence, in fashion, is not enough. One needs a point of view, and that view must be legible not only to the trade but to the customer willing to spend €3,000 on a handbag.

There is a case to be made that Prada's current ambiguity is strategic — that in an era of rapid trend cycles and algorithmic visibility, the house has chosen to occupy a more durable, if less spectacular, position. Sell the bags, stage the shows, maintain the foundation, and trust that quality will compound over time. This is not an unreasonable strategy. But it is a conservative one, and conservatism has never been Prada's strength.

The fall 2024 collection closed with a series of coats, each one slightly different in length and proportion, worn over trousers in varying widths. The models moved quickly, and the overall effect was one of competence rather than revelation. Backstage, Miuccia Prada told a reporter that she and Simons were "still figuring it out." One appreciates the honesty. But four years into a partnership, one might also expect a clearer sense of destination.

In the end, perhaps the orange lining is the tell. Hidden until the moment of movement, visible only to those paying attention, a flash of something urgent beneath the composed exterior. Whether that flash is enough to sustain a house of Prada's scale and ambition is a question the next few seasons will answer.