Portrait : le directeur artistique de Prada

The fitting room on Via Fogazzaro runs narrow, lit by overhead fluorescents that render fabric exactly as it will appear under retail LEDs three months hence. Miuccia Prada stands to one side, arms crossed, watching a model turn in a coat whose sleeves stop two inches short of the wrist. Beside her, Raf Simons tilts his head, says something inaudible, and she nods once. The coat stays. The sleeves stay shorter still.

This is the partnership now entering its fourth year, and the dynamic remains what it was in February 2020, when Prada announced Simons as co-creative director: two distinct sensibilities in conversation, neither subordinate. Miuccia Prada, who took over her family's leather-goods house in 1978 and spent four decades building a vocabulary of intelligent ugliness, cerebral provocation, and bourgeois discomfort. Raf Simons, who arrived with his own catalogue of references — youth subculture, Belgian minimalism, American campus life — and no apparent interest in being subsumed.

The arrangement is rare. Most houses operate under a single authorial voice, and for good reason: fashion is a medium of aesthetic coherence, and coherence is difficult when two people hold the pencil. But Prada, both the woman and the house, has never been interested in easy answers.

Formation

Miuccia Prada — born Maria Bianchi in 1949 — studied political science at the University of Milan, joined the Communist Party, trained as a mime at the Piccolo Teatro. She has described those years as formative not because they taught her to sketch, which she still does reluctantly, but because they taught her to think about power, performance, and the gap between intention and perception. When she entered the family business in the late seventies, Prada was a small Milanese maker of luggage and handbags, respected in certain circles, invisible beyond them.

Her first collection, in 1989, featured nylon backpacks in a fabric previously reserved for military tarpaulins. The logo was minimal, the price was not. Vogue Italia took notice. Within three years, the Prada nylon bag had become the discreet signifier of a particular kind of taste: intellectual, anti-logomania, European in affect. One suspects Miuccia Prada understood, even then, that fashion could function as a language for people who distrusted fashion.

Raf Simons came to the métier from a different direction. Born in Neerpelt, Belgium, in 1968, he studied industrial design in Genk, worked briefly in furniture, then pivoted to fashion after seeing a Martin Margiela show in Paris. His own label, launched in 1995, trafficked in skinny tailoring, raw hems, and references to post-punk youth culture — the kind of clothes worn by boys who listened to Joy Division and read i-D. The silhouette was narrow, the palette severe, the attitude unmistakable.

He moved through several houses over the next two decades: Jil Sander, where he refined his minimalism; Dior, where he collided high tailoring with Americana and Warhol florals; Calvin Klein, where the marriage of vision and commercial structure proved less than harmonious. By the time Prada called, Simons had spent twenty-five years proving he could make clothes that looked like no one else's. The question was whether he could make clothes that looked like Prada's.

Virage

The announcement in February 2020 landed just weeks before the pandemic shuttered Milan. Simons would join as co-creative director, working alongside Miuccia Prada on all collections. Not as her successor, not as a consultant, but as an equal. The industry received the news with a mixture of fascination and scepticism. Prada had always been a house of singular vision; what would it mean to split that vision in two?

The first co-designed collection, presented digitally in September 2020, offered an answer of sorts. The clothes were recognisably Prada — nylon, odd proportions, a certain intellectual chill — but inflected with Simons's affection for American sportswear and his habit of making the everyday strange. A padded nylon jacket in traffic-cone orange. A brocade coat over a T-shirt printed with a Jeff Koons balloon dog. The show notes spoke of "a new method of working" and "an ongoing conversation." One could read that as corporate copy, or one could look at the clothes and see two people arguing their way toward something neither would have made alone.

What followed has been a series of collections that refuse easy summary. Spring 2021 leaned into uniform dressing — shirt-and-skirt sets, sober suiting, the kind of clothes one might wear to an office that no longer exists. Fall 2021 brought cropped cardigans, A-line skirts, and a palette of brown, grey, and institutional green. There were echoes of mid-century Milanese tailoring, of Simons's Jil Sander years, of the Prada archive, but the sum felt neither nostalgic nor referential. It felt, instead, like a negotiation.

The handbags and accessories, historically the house's commercial engine, have continued along a parallel track. The Galleria bag, introduced in 2007, remains in production, its Saffiano leather and gold-plated hardware a study in facture. The Re-Edition nylon bags, which revisit designs from the nineties, have found a second life among a generation too young to remember the first. And the Cleo, a hobo-style bag with a curved silhouette and a single shoulder strap, has become the kind of shape one sees on three continents within a season.

Signature

If there is a signature to the Prada-Simons era, it is a willingness to let contradictions coexist. A nylon parka over a sequined skirt. A brocade coat with sneakers. Clothes that suggest both austerity and excess, both restraint and indulgence, without resolving the tension. This is not, one should note, a postmodern gesture. It is a practical one. The Prada customer, whoever she is, does not dress in a single register. She layers, she juxtaposes, she wears a Cleo bag with a Uniqlo turtleneck and thinks nothing of it.

Simons has said, in interviews, that he and Miuccia Prada do not always agree. That they debate silhouettes, fabrics, the placement of a pocket. That the process is slower, more iterative, than working alone. Miuccia Prada, for her part, has described the partnership as "a kind of freedom," though she has not elaborated on what that freedom entails.

The financial results suggest the arrangement is working. Prada Group reported revenues of €4.2 billion in 2023, a 17 per cent increase over the previous year. The brand has opened new flagships in Seoul, Miami, and Tokyo. The waiting list for certain Galleria styles now stretches into double-digit weeks. Whether this reflects the strength of the co-creative model or simply the resilience of the luxury sector in a time of economic uncertainty is difficult to say. Probably both.

What follows

The next chapter, if there is one, remains unwritten. Miuccia Prada is seventy-five. Raf Simons is fifty-six. The partnership, as currently structured, cannot continue indefinitely, and neither has spoken publicly about succession. One imagines the conversation has taken place behind closed doors, in the same fitting rooms where sleeves are shortened and hems are raised and two people argue their way toward a coat.

For now, the work continues. The Spring 2025 collection, shown in September, featured pleated skirts in technical nylon, oversized blazers with exaggerated shoulders, and a series of handbags in a new shape — somewhere between a doctor's bag and a bowling bag, rendered in calfskin with contrast stitching. The show notes mentioned "a dialogue between past and future," which is the kind of phrase one writes when the present is too complicated to summarise.

In the end, what Prada and Simons have built together is not a unified aesthetic but a method. A way of working that allows two strong voices to coexist without one drowning out the other. Whether that method can survive beyond this particular pairing is an open question. But for now, in the fitting rooms on Via Fogazzaro, the lights stay bright and the sleeves stay short and the conversation continues.