The spring 1996 show opened with a woman in a brown nylon coat

The spring 1996 show opened with a woman in a brown nylon coat. Not camel, not tobacco — brown. Flat, industrial, the colour of a military duffel or a courier satchel. The garment hung straight from the shoulder, unadorned save for a grosgrain ribbon at the collar. No one, in that moment, mistook it for luxury. That was the point.

Miuccia Prada had spent the better part of a decade turning her family's leather-goods atelier into a fashion house by refusing the terms on which fashion houses were supposed to operate. Where others reached for silk, she used synthetic. Where they valorised the artisan, she courted the factory. The nylon backpack — the vela, as it came to be known — arrived in 1984 as a deliberate affront to the idea that a Prada product should announce itself through material preciousness. It announced itself, instead, through a triangle of enamelled metal and a fabric borrowed from military surplus. The bag sold because it didn't look like it was trying.

That instinct — to strip luxury of its received language and rebuild it from scratch — has defined Prada across three distinct eras. The first, under Mario Prada, established craft. The second, under Miuccia, interrogated it. The third, now shared with Raf Simons, asks whether interrogation itself has become a house style, and what comes after.

Fratelli Prada: l'atelier comme fondation

Mario Prada opened his first shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913. The location mattered. Milan's arcaded shopping gallery was not a street; it was a stage, and the clientele that passed through it expected a certain facture. Prada supplied it: English steamer trunks, crocodile handbags, walrus-leather valises fitted with silver hardware and lined in suede. The work was meticulous. The house built its reputation on an almost pedantic attention to joinery, to the way a clasp met its keeper, to the grain-match across a flap.

This was atelier work in the traditional sense — small runs, bespoke commissions, an emphasis on durability over novelty. Prada's clients were aristocrats and industrialists, people who travelled by rail and ocean liner and required luggage that could withstand both. The house supplied the Italian royal family, a distinction it wore quietly but never discarded. The crest — a knotted rope surrounding the Savoy coat of arms — remained on every product, even decades after the monarchy dissolved.

Mario's daughter Luisa took over in 1958. She expanded the line, opened a second location, kept the quality constant. But she did not reimagine the house. That work fell to her daughter.

Miuccia: la rupture comme méthode

Miuccia Prada joined the family business in 1978, a PhD in political science already behind her, no particular reverence for the luxury trade ahead of her. She had spent the previous decade in the Communist Party, performing mime theatre, thinking about feminism and class. The idea that she would one day design handbags for the international bourgeoisie was, by her own accounting, improbable.

Her early collections were experiments in negation. The nylon backpack, introduced in 1984 with her then-partner Patrizio Bertelli, became the house's first breakout product not because it was beautiful — though it was, in a severe, functional way — but because it refused to perform luxury as spectacle. It was light. It was waterproof. It cost less than a leather bag and looked, intentionally, like something a bike messenger might carry. The logo, that enamelled triangle, was the only ornament, and even that felt like an ID tag rather than a flourish.

The ready-to-wear line, launched in 1988, extended the same logic to clothing. Miuccia's early collections featured boxy coats in drab colours, skirts that sat below the knee, cardigans that might have come from a church jumble sale. The press called it "ugly chic," a term she never fully disavowed. The clothes were intellectual, which is to say they required you to think about why you were looking at them. A brown nylon coat wasn't pretty. It was a proposition.

By the mid-nineties, Prada had become the house that made you reconsider what you thought you wanted. The spring 1996 collection — that brown coat, followed by slip dresses in mint green and ochre, worn with flat sandals and no jewellery — arrived at the height of minimalism but refused its sleekness. Where Jil Sander offered purity, Prada offered ambivalence. The clothes were austere but not serene. They looked, as more than one critic noted, like they'd been chosen by someone who didn't care about fashion, which made them irresistible to people who cared about it a great deal.

Miuccia's method, over the next two decades, became a kind of house signature: take a garment type, strip it of its associations, rebuild it with a single unexpected detail. A bowling shirt in printed silk. A cardigan with crystals clustered at the placket. A knee-length skirt in floral brocade, worn with a nylon bomber. The pieces didn't cohere into a unified aesthetic so much as they orbited a set of recurring questions. What does it mean to dress like a woman? What does it mean to dress like an intellectual? What does it mean to dress at all?

The accessories followed the same trajectory. The Galleria bag, introduced in 2007, took the house's archival saffiano leather — a crosshatch-embossed calfskin Mario had used for trunk exteriors — and turned it into a structured top-handle in jewel tones. It was both a return to craft and a refusal of nostalgia. The bag referenced the archive without replicating it. You could see the lineage, but you couldn't mistake it for a reissue.

Raf Simons: la conversation comme structure

When Prada announced in 2020 that Raf Simons would join Miuccia as co-creative director, the industry read it as succession planning. That wasn't quite right. Simons didn't arrive to inherit the house; he arrived to argue with it.

The first co-designed collection, for spring 2021, was shown in a digital format — a necessity of the pandemic, but also a format that suited the work. The clothes were dialogues. A Prada-ish A-line skirt in technical fabric, paired with a Simons-ish oversized blazer in prince-of-wales check. A slip dress in mint green — a direct citation of spring 1996 — worn under a boxy coat with exaggerated shoulders. The pieces didn't resolve into a single vision. They held two visions in tension, and the tension was the point.

Simons brought with him a different set of references: Belgian modernism, American sportswear, the clean lines of Bauhaus furniture. Where Miuccia's work often felt like it was interrogating femininity from the inside, Simons approached it from a cooler distance, more interested in proportion than in psychology. The collaboration worked, when it worked, because neither designer deferred. A Prada show under the co-direction reads less like a unified collection than like a conversation in which both parties are talking at once.

The accessories have followed suit. The Cleo, introduced in 2021, is a soft-bodied shoulder bag with a curved silhouette and a brushed-metal logo. It's more overtly feminine than the Galleria, more tactile than the nylon backpack, and it's sold exceptionally well — proof, perhaps, that the market still wants Prada to make a straightforward handbag now and then. But straightforward, at Prada, is always relative. The bag's brushed hardware and slightly rumpled leather give it a lived-in quality, as though it's already halfway to patina.

Ce qui reste

Prada, at 110 years, is not a house that trades on continuity. It has no signature silhouette, no house fabric, no colour it returns to season after season. What it has, instead, is a method: take the language of luxury, examine it until it stops making sense, then use it anyway. The nylon backpack is now a 900-euro object, which is absurd until you hold one and realise the stitching hasn't changed since 1984. The brown coat from spring 1996 shows up, in various iterations, every few years — never quite the same, always recognisably the same gesture.

Miuccia once said, in an interview, that she designs clothes for women who think too much. It's a line that gets quoted often, usually out of context, but it holds. Prada's clothes require you to meet them halfway. They don't flatter in the conventional sense. They don't announce status, at least not loudly. What they do is give you something to think about while you're getting dressed, which is a service the luxury market doesn't often provide.

The house's current position — co-directed, critically lauded, commercially robust — feels less like a resolution than like another chapter in an ongoing argument. Simons and Miuccia will continue to push against each other, and the collections will continue to feel slightly unresolved, and that irresolution will continue to sell. One suspects Miuccia prefers it that way.

There's a photograph from the spring 1996 show, backstage, just before the models went out. Miuccia is adjusting the collar on that brown nylon coat, her face intent, her hands precise. The model is looking elsewhere. The coat hangs straight. It's still, in its way, the ugliest thing in the room.