The Pocono nylon backpack sits in the archive room on via Fogazzaro, black as a priest's cassock and about as glamorous

The Pocono nylon backpack sits in the archive room on via Fogazzaro, black as a priest's cassock and about as glamorous. Miuccia Prada showed it in 1984, priced it modestly, and watched it sell to students who had no idea they were buying into what would become, over the next four decades, one of the most intellectually restive fashion houses in Europe. The bag was made from the same industrial tessuto her grandfather had used to line steamer trunks in 1913. She turned the lining outward. That inversion — practical material elevated, luxury code refused — remains the house's organising principle.

Fratelli Prada: function, then form

Mario Prada opened his leathergoods atelier in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913, a moment when Milan's bourgeoisie still looked to Paris for taste and to England for travelling cases. He worked in walrus skin, tortoiseshell, and fine calf, supplying the kind of client who required a fitted case for opera glasses. The work was meticulous. The market was narrow. His daughter Luisa inherited the business in 1958 and ran it quietly for two decades, maintaining craft standards while the fashion industry around her exploded into ready-to-wear.

Miuccia Prada, Luisa's youngest daughter, earned a PhD in political science and spent the seventies working in theatre and the Communist party. She joined the family business in 1978 with no design training and, one suspects, little reverence for the codes her grandfather had upheld. She began with accessories — the Pocono line, then a series of nylon totes that borrowed their material from military surplus suppliers. The choice was both pragmatic and pointed. Nylon was light, durable, and, crucially, not leather. It carried no historical weight. She could make it mean what she wanted.

The bags moved. By the late eighties, the black nylon tote with its discreet triangular logo had become a fixture in Milan, then Paris, then New York. It appealed to women who worked, travelled, and had no patience for the fussier semiotics of a quilted flap bag. Prada, still a small operation, opened its first ready-to-wear line for women in 1989. The clothes shared the bags' logic: clean, cerebral, slightly severe. Hemlines dropped to mid-calf. Colours leaned toward grey-brown and moss. The silhouette was neither body-conscious nor voluminous, but something in between — a studied refusal of the prevailing modes.

The nineties: anti-fashion as fashion

What followed was a decade in which Prada became, paradoxically, the most fashionable house by appearing to reject fashion altogether. Miuccia's collections between 1992 and 1999 read like a series of provocations. She showed brown. She showed prints that looked like wallpaper from a minor government office. She cut skirts to hit at the least flattering point on the leg and paired them with chunky-heeled Mary Janes that made the models walk like schoolgirls. The press called it ugly chic. The clients called it Prada.

The spring 1996 collection remains a case study. Miuccia sent out dresses in synthetic fabrics — polyester, nylon blends, materials associated with budget department stores — and styled them with an almost perverse simplicity. No jewellery. Hair pulled back. The effect was austere, intellectual, vaguely unsettling. Suzy Menkes wrote that Prada had made "a virtue of the banal." The collection sold out.

Patrizio Bertelli, Miuccia's husband and the house's CEO since 1978, oversaw an aggressive expansion during this period. Prada acquired Jil Sander in 1999, Helmut Lang in 2004, a stake in Fendi, a piece of Church's. The strategy was to build a luxury conglomerate that could rival LVMH and Kering, anchored by Prada's growing cultural capital. The acquisitions, as it turned out, were less successful than the anchor. Prada divested most of the portfolio by 2006, refocusing on its own label and Miu Miu, the younger-skewing line Miuccia had launched in 1993.

Miu Miu deserves its own mention here. Where Prada leaned cerebral, Miu Miu leaned playful — or as playful as Miuccia Prada gets, which is to say it involved shorter hemlines, brighter colours, and a certain knowing naïveté. The spring 2022 Miu Miu collection, with its low-slung micro-miniskirts and cropped cardigans, became one of the most commercially successful launches in the house's history. It also became, briefly, the subject of a thousand TikTok videos, which tells you something about the distance between 1996 and now.

Raf Simons arrives: two minds, one house

In February 2020, Prada announced that Raf Simons would join as co-creative director, effective April of that year. The appointment surprised no one and clarified nothing. Simons had spent two decades building a reputation for rigorous, often austere menswear, first at his own label, then at Jil Sander, then Dior, then Calvin Klein. His aesthetic shared certain frequencies with Miuccia's — a distrust of easy prettiness, a preference for intellectual over emotional appeal — but the question of how two strong authorial voices would coexist remained open.

The answer, four years in, is that they coexist by remaining distinct. The collections since autumn 2020 have carried a doubled signature: Miuccia's instinct for the perverse and quotidian, Simons' for the sculptural and slightly melancholic. A coat might be cut with the clean, enveloping volume Simons favoured at Jil Sander, then paired with a skirt in one of Miuccia's unsettling prints. The tension is intentional. In interviews, both designers have spoken about the value of disagreement, of working through conflicting instincts rather than smoothing them into consensus.

The spring 2023 men's show offered a clear example. Models walked in elongated topcoats over shorts, the proportions verging on awkward, the palette shifting from camel to grey to a strange, mossy green. The collection felt like a conversation between two people who respect each other but don't always agree — which is, perhaps, the most honest way to run a creative partnership.

Where the house stands

Prada reported revenue of €4.2 billion in 2023, up eighteen percent from the previous year. The Miu Miu micro-skirt effect has faded, but the underlying strength remains. The house has managed, against considerable odds, to stay relevant across five decades without collapsing into nostalgia or chasing trend cycles. That's rarer than it sounds.

The Milan flagship on via Montenapoleone reopened in 2023 after a two-year renovation. The interiors, designed by Roberto Baciocchi, use the same green marble that lined the original Galleria boutique in 1913. The gesture is subtle — not a return to origins, exactly, but an acknowledgment that origins matter. Walk through the space and you'll find the nylon backpacks on one wall, the leather goods on another, and between them a century of evolution that never quite severed the thread.

Miuccia Prada turned seventy-five in May. Raf Simons is fifty-six. Succession planning at privately held fashion houses is always opaque, but one assumes the question is being discussed. For now, the work continues: two collections a year for Prada, two for Miu Miu, collaborations with artists and architects, the occasional museum retrospective. The rhythm is relentless. The output is uneven, as it always has been. Some seasons cohere, others sprawl. Miuccia herself has said she doesn't believe in masterpieces, only in the next collection.

The Pocono backpack, meanwhile, is back in production. Prada re-issued it in 2019 as part of a Re-Nylon initiative using recycled ocean plastic. It sells for €750, which is roughly ten times what it cost in 1984, and it looks identical. The lining is still on the outside. The logic still holds.