The fitting room at Via Fogazzaro, sometime in the mid-nineties

The fitting room at Via Fogazzaro, sometime in the mid-nineties. Miuccia Prada adjusts a sleeve on a nylon jacket so thin it could fold into a cigarette case. The model shifts her weight. "Non così," Prada says, tugging the fabric back toward the shoulder blade. "It should feel like nothing, but it has to sit." The girl is tall, angular, and looks faintly bored. That, too, is part of the brief.

Prada has never chased the muse in the traditional sense — no single face held up as the embodiment of the house. Instead, there have been women who, through repetition or instinct or sheer presence, became inseparable from what the maison was building. Three in particular: Amber Valletta, who gave the house its American cool in the era when Prada was rewriting minimalism; Gemma Ward, who arrived as the codes began to fracture; and Freja Beha Erichsen, who carried the brand through its most cerebral, least ingratiating phase. Each represented a different Prada. Each was, in her way, the right face at the right moment.

Amber Valletta: The Pragmatist

Valletta walked for Prada across five consecutive seasons in the mid-nineties, a stretch that included spring 1996 — the collection that introduced the nylon backpack to the luxury conversation — and autumn 1996, when Prada sent out those severe A-line skirts in technical fabrics that read, from a distance, like wool suiting. Valletta's face was symmetrical to the point of geometry, her walk efficient. She didn't emote. She didn't need to.

What made her the face of that era was precisely her refusal to perform femininity in the expected register. Prada was not interested in seduction, at least not the overt kind. The clothes were intellectual propositions: nylon elevated, hemlines dropped, colour drained to grey-brown-black. Valletta moved through them with the same energy one might bring to a lecture hall. It was fashion, yes, but it was also a thesis.

Her editorial work for the house ran in parallel. Steven Meisel shot her for the spring 1997 campaign in a series of stark, almost clinical frames — white backdrop, minimal styling, no narrative. The bag, a small top-handle in black tessuto, sat in her lap like a briefcase. The message was clear: this is a woman who works, who thinks, who does not require your approval.

By 1998, Valletta had moved on. Prada, too, was shifting — the collections grew more ornate, more referential. The moment had passed. But the template remained: a muse for Prada is not decorative. She is a collaborator in the argument the clothes are making.

Gemma Ward: The Innocent, Interrupted

Ward arrived at Prada in 2004, a sixteen-year-old Australian with a face that looked, depending on the light, either cherubic or alien. Her eyes sat wide apart, her lips formed a near-perfect Cupid's bow, and her proportions defied the angular standard that had dominated the previous decade. Prada cast her immediately.

The autumn 2004 collection was a departure. Where the nineties had been about reduction, this was about complication: clashing prints, dropped waists, an almost perverse prettiness. Ward's face made sense of it. She could wear a floral jacquard coat over a striped knit and look, somehow, composed. The styling was deliberate — hair pulled back, minimal makeup, no attempt to soften or sexualise. She was a child playing dress-up in her grandmother's wardrobe, but the grandmother in question had impeccable, if idiosyncratic, taste.

Meisel shot her again for the spring 2005 campaign, this time in a series of images that leaned into the uncanny. Ward stood alone in each frame, her expression blank, her posture rigid. The clothes — a brocade coat, a silk dress with an asymmetric hem — looked almost too large for her. The effect was unsettling. One suspected that was the point.

Ward's tenure at Prada coincided with the house's most overt engagement with beauty as a problem rather than a solution. The collections from that period asked uncomfortable questions: What happens when prettiness is pushed too far? When decoration becomes obstruction? Ward's face, at once innocent and strange, became the visual shorthand for those questions.

She left the industry in 2008, citing exhaustion. Prada continued, but the tone shifted again. The next chapter would require a different kind of face.

Freja Beha Erichsen: The Intellectual

Erichsen's first Prada campaign ran in autumn 2005, but her association with the house deepened over the following decade. Where Valletta had been pragmatic and Ward had been peculiar, Erichsen was severe. Her features were sharp, her gaze direct, her presence almost confrontational. She did not invite warmth. She did not need to.

The campaigns she anchored — often shot by Meisel, occasionally by others — were studies in restraint. Autumn 2009: Erichsen in a wool coat, standing in front of a painted backdrop of a European cityscape, her expression unreadable. Spring 2013: a series of close-ups, her face half-shadowed, the clothes barely visible. The focus was not on the garment but on the woman wearing it, and the woman in question was not interested in performing for the camera.

This was Prada at its most cerebral. The collections from the late 2000s and early 2010s were dense with references — art history, cinema, architecture — and the casting reflected that complexity. Erichsen could wear a brocade skirt and a nylon bomber in the same look and make it legible. She was, in effect, the visual translator for a house that had stopped explaining itself.

Her work for Prada extended beyond the runway and the campaign. She appeared in short films commissioned by the house, in editorial spreads that blurred the line between fashion and fine art, in installations at the Fondazione Prada. She became, in a sense, part of the intellectual infrastructure of the brand.

By the mid-2010s, Prada had begun to diversify its casting, moving away from the single-muse model toward a more fragmented, less hierarchical approach. Erichsen remained in the orbit, but the centre had shifted. The era of the defining face, it seemed, had passed.

What Remains

Prada does not sentimentalise its past. The archive is consulted, certainly, but never revered. The women who defined the house at various moments are not trotted out for anniversary campaigns or retrospective editorials. They were useful, and then they were not, and the work continued.

What they share, these three, is a refusal to be decorative. Valletta, Ward, and Erichsen each brought something specific to the table — pragmatism, strangeness, severity — and each was deployed at the moment when that quality aligned with what the house was attempting. They were not muses in the romantic sense. They were tools, wielded with precision.

Whether Prada will return to the single-face model remains to be seen. The current campaigns favour multiplicity, a rotating cast of faces that shift season to season. It is, arguably, a more democratic approach. It is also, one suspects, a more cautious one. The risk of the muse is that she becomes larger than the work itself. Prada, above all, does not cede control.