The fitting room at Prada's Via Fogazzaro headquarters runs cooler than most

The fitting room at Prada's Via Fogazzaro headquarters runs cooler than most. Raf Simons stands near the window in a black sweater, arms crossed, watching a model turn in a coat whose shoulders have been restructured three times since morning. He says nothing for twelve seconds. Then: "The sleeve head. Again." It is this silence, more than the direction that follows, that defines the room.

Simons arrived at Prada in 2020 as co-creative director alongside Miuccia Prada, a pairing that read, on paper, like a thought experiment. She, the house founder's granddaughter, who spent four decades turning bourgeois restraint into a language. He, the Belgian who built his reputation on youth, on the angular beauty of disaffection. What they share, it turns out, is a distrust of the obvious.

Formation

Simons did not train as a designer. He studied industrial design at the Genk campus of what is now LUCA School of Arts, then furniture design in Antwerp under Walter Van Beirendonck, one of the Antwerp Six. His 1995 menswear debut — shown in a repurposed furniture gallery, models cast from nightclubs rather than agencies — arrived without the usual apprenticeship. No atelier training. No pattern-cutting under a master. He learned by making, which is to say by failing in private and correcting in public.

The early collections carried a specific charge. Simons was looking at youth culture not as spectacle but as a set of codes: the way a parka sits on a thin frame, the exact width of a trouser that reads as defiance rather than mistake. His references — Kraftwerk, David Lynch, the hardcore scene in Antwerp — were never nostalgic. They were structural. He borrowed the proportions of subculture and applied them to tailoring, to outerwear, to the mechanics of a shirt cuff.

By the time he took over Jil Sander in 2005, that methodology had matured. The work there was quieter, more concerned with facture than with statement. A seam placed two centimetres higher. A sleeve that tapered in a way that changed how the body moved. It was design that required a second look, and sometimes a third.

The Dior Interlude

His three years at Dior, from 2012 to 2015, remain the most debated chapter. Simons brought his minimalist instinct to a house built on volume, on the sculptural femininity of the New Look. The tension was productive, then it wasn't. He introduced flat shoes to the runway. He cast Vanessa Axente, all cheekbones and remove, as his recurring face. He worked with Sterling Ruby on prints that felt like they belonged in a different room.

The clothes were rigorous. The house, one suspects, wanted rapture. When he departed, the statement was brief and without rancour, but the subtext was clear: authorship and patrimoine do not always align.

What followed was a four-year pause from fashion houses. Simons returned to his own label, showed in New York, collaborated with Fred Perry and Calvin Klein on his terms. It was a recalibration. He had proven he could operate within the apparatus of a legacy house; now he was asking whether he should.

The Prada Proposition

Miuccia Prada called in 2020. Not to hand over the reins — she had no intention of stepping aside — but to split them. The structure was without precedent at this level: two creative directors, equal billing, shared runway. No his-and-hers divisions. No fragmentation by category. Every collection conceived and signed by both.

The first co-designed show, for Spring/Summer 2021, arrived in September 2020 via digital presentation. It was spare, cerebral, shot in a void. The clothes played with contradiction: a bra worn over a shirt, a nylon coat over a silk slip, proportions that shifted between restraint and provocation within a single look. The press release offered little guidance. The work was left to speak, or not.

What has emerged over the past four years is not a merger of two voices but a third language. Prada under Simons and Prada is more direct than her solo work, less ornamented, but it retains her interest in the perverse detail — the ugly-beautiful shoe, the bag that refuses charm. From Simons comes a sharpness of line, a refusal to seduce through conventional means. The collections do not aim for beauty in the commercial sense. They aim for a kind of clarity.

Signature, Shared

Identifying what belongs to whom is a parlour game the house does not encourage. Simons has said, in an interview with System magazine, that the process involves constant negotiation, that ideas are dismantled and rebuilt until origin becomes irrelevant. Prada has noted, more than once, that collaboration requires a willingness to be wrong.

Certain tendencies recur. The use of nylon, Prada's signature material since the Eighties, has become more architectural under the partnership. Tailoring has sharpened. There is a consistent interest in the space between garment and body — not the fit, exactly, but the air around it. Colour is deployed with caution: a season might hinge on a single shade of green, then vanish into black and khaki for the next.

The accessories have remained commercially robust. The Re-Edition bags, the Monolith boots, the nylon bucket hat that became, against all reason, ubiquitous in 2021. These are products that move units, that sustain the atelier, that allow the ready-to-wear to take risks the spreadsheet might not otherwise permit.

What Follows

Simons turned fifty-six this year. Prada is seventy-five. The question of succession, of what happens when one or both step away, is not yet urgent but no longer distant. Prada Group has not indicated a timeline. The collections continue at their rhythm: two menswear shows, two womenswear, each one a negotiation between intellect and instinct.

The work does not chase trends, which is both a strength and a commercial gamble. In an industry that increasingly rewards the loud, the viral, the immediately comprehensible, Prada under this partnership asks for patience. The clothes do not reveal themselves in a photograph. They require proximity, sometimes touch. A hem finished in a particular way. A shoulder that only makes sense in motion.

Whether this approach endures beyond the current structure is an open question. What is certain is that Simons has found, at Prada, a context that accommodates his rigor without demanding compromise. And Prada has found, in Simons, a collaborator who does not mistake heritage for instruction.

The fitting continues. The sleeve head is adjusted once more. Simons nods, then moves to the next look. There are eighteen more to review before the atelier closes for the evening.