## Les muses de Prada

Les muses de Prada

Miuccia Prada does not, as a rule, speak of muses. She prefers collaborators, or better yet, women who happen to occupy the same moment she does. Yet walk through the archive — the one housed in the basement of Via Fogazzaro, not the sanitised version shown to press — and three faces recur with enough frequency to suggest something closer to fixation. Not Gemma Ward, though she opened seventeen shows. Not Daria Werbowy, despite the Fondazione campaign that ran for three seasons. The women who shaped Prada's visual language did so less by embodying an ideal than by resisting one.

Linda Evangelista arrived at Prada in 1996, already the highest-paid model working. She had closed Versace the season prior in a chain-mail gown that required two dressers and a chiropractor on standby. Prada put her in a brown nylon coat with oversized patch pockets and a hemline that grazed mid-calf, neither flattering nor particularly avant-garde. The coat moved when she did. It looked, a buyer noted at the time, like something you might actually wear on the Métro if you had excellent posture and no fear of being ordinary.

Evangelista's relationship with the house lasted nine seasons, spanning the period when Prada shifted from intellectual curiosity to commercial juggernaut. She wore the SS98 collection — those acid-yellow shifts with the dropped waist — and the AW00 furs that Miuccia later said she regretted on ecological grounds but stood by aesthetically. What Evangelista brought to the runway was precision. Her walk was mechanical in the best sense: no improvisation, no winks at the photographer pit, just the garment advancing through space at a fixed tempo. Prada, which has always leaned toward the architectural, required exactly that. A less disciplined model would have tried to sell the pieces. Evangelista simply wore them.

The second face belongs to someone who never walked a Prada runway.

Elsa Schiaparelli died in 1973, two decades before Miuccia launched her first ready-to-wear line, but her influence on the house is a matter of record. Miuccia has cited Schiaparelli in precisely three interviews — once to The New Yorker in 2014, once to System in 2006, and once, briefly, to Vogue Italia in 1999. In each instance, she emphasised not the surrealist gestures — the lobster dress, the shoe hat — but the underlying method. Schiaparelli worked from a position of intellectual remove. She treated fashion as a series of problems to be solved through form, not fantasy. She was, Miuccia said in the 2014 piece, "the opposite of a romantic."

Prada's SS08 collection made the connection explicit. The show opened with a series of trompe-l'œil prints: a necklace rendered in two dimensions across a crêpe de chine bodice, a belt that existed only as an image on silk twill. The effect was Schiaparelli's Tear Dress refracted through Milanese restraint — surrealism without the melodrama. Miuccia has never called Schiaparelli a muse, but she has also never stopped answering the question Schiaparelli posed in 1937: what happens when you treat a garment as a conceptual object first and a piece of cloth second?

The third woman is still working.

Gigi Hadid joined Prada in 2021, a casting choice that puzzled the Milan regulars. She had spent the previous five years as the face of American sportswear — Tommy Hilfiger, Reebok, the Maybelline contract that ran in forty-three markets. She was, in the language of the industry, overexposed. Prada does not typically work with overexposed models. The house prefers unknowns or, failing that, actresses who can be relied upon not to appear in a tabloid holding an iced coffee.

Hadid's first Prada campaign, shot by David Sims for SS22, positioned her against a grey backdrop in a Re-Nylon bucket hat and a pair of technical shorts that sat low on the hip. No jewellery, no styling flourishes, no attempt to make the pieces cohere into an outfit. She looked, a stylist observed at the time, like someone who had been interrupted mid-errand. The campaign performed well in Asia and exceeded projections in North America, which may explain why Hadid has since appeared in four additional seasons, including the AW23 men's campaign where she wore a shearling coat and little else.

What Hadid provides is legibility. Prada's collections have grown increasingly dense — the AW24 show featured ninety-three exits, many of them layered to the point of illegibility — and Hadid's presence offers a point of entry. She is famous enough to register with a consumer who does not follow fashion, but not so famous that she overshadows the garment. This is a delicate balance, one that requires a model to suppress her own affect without disappearing entirely. Hadid manages it by moving through the frame as though she is alone in it, a trick she likely learned from Evangelista, who pioneered the technique thirty years prior.

The through-line is not beauty, though all three women photograph well. It is not youth — Evangelista was thirty-one when she started at Prada, Schiaparelli was fifty-three when she staged her final show. The common thread is a certain quality of self-possession, a refusal to perform desire or vulnerability or any of the other emotional registers that fashion typically demands of women. Prada has always been drawn to women who appear to be thinking about something other than how they look. Whether that is a commercial strategy or a personal preference is difficult to parse, and Miuccia has not clarified the matter.

The maison continues to cast widely — the AW24 show included twenty-one models, none of whom appeared in the previous season — but the aesthetic template remains fixed. Prada wants women who can wear a garment without editorialising, who understand that the work is in the cut, not the pose. This is not, it should be said, a universally appealing proposition. There are houses that want their models to seduce, to provoke, to collapse the distance between garment and viewer. Prada is not one of them.

One suspects the next muse, if there is one, will arrive unannounced. She will walk into a casting in Milan or New York or Seoul, and someone in the room will recognise the same quality Miuccia saw in Evangelista in 1996: the ability to render a piece of clothing legible without making it easy. Whether that woman will be famous or unknown, twenty or forty, is beside the point. What matters is that she will not try to sell you the garment. She will simply wear it, and trust that the garment can speak for itself.