The fitting room on the fourth floor of Via Fogazzaro is smaller than one expects

The fitting room on the fourth floor of Via Fogazzaro is smaller than one expects. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons stand shoulder to shoulder, examining a coat that will not, in the end, make the collection. The sleeves are wrong — too considered, Simons says later, in a tone that suggests he has been thinking about this for some time. Prada nods. The coat is pulled.

This is how it works now, five seasons into the co-creative directorship that began in April 2020. Two voices, two sets of references, two methods of arriving at the same garment. It is not, by any account, an obvious pairing. Prada built her career on intellectual provocation and a studied resistance to beauty; Simons came up through Belgian minimalism and a decade-long tenure at Dior that leaned, at times, into the decorative. And yet the work that has emerged since their partnership began feels less like compromise than counterpoint.

Formation

Miuccia Prada did not train as a designer. She studied political science at the University of Milan, earned a doctorate, and spent five years performing with a communist mime troupe. When she joined the family business in 1978, it was a leather-goods concern with a single shop and a reputation for discreet craft. Her grandfather had founded the house in 1913; her mother ran it with quiet efficiency. There was no suggestion, at the time, that Prada would become what it is now.

The nylon backpack arrived in 1984. Pocono, the industrial fabric Prada sourced from a military supplier, was lightweight, durable, and entirely unromantic. Fashion, at that moment, was trafficking heavily in status — logomania, shoulder pads, the gleaming armour of the power suit. Prada's bag was the opposite: matte, functional, almost perversely plain. It sold regardless. Within a decade, the triangular metal plaque had become one of the most recognised marks in the industry.

Raf Simons, meanwhile, came to fashion through furniture. He studied industrial design in Genk, worked briefly in the field, then attended an Antwerp Six show in 1991 and decided, more or less on the spot, to change course. He launched his own menswear line in 1995 with no formal training and a clear point of view: youth as a site of tension, not aspiration. The early collections referenced subcultural codes — skinheads, ravers, post-punk — but stripped of their context, rendered in precise tailoring and hard, beautiful fabrics. The work was cerebral and oddly moving.

Virage

Prada's first ready-to-wear collection arrived in 1988. The clothes were brown, grey, beige — colours that fashion, at the time, largely ignored. Hemlines dropped. Silhouettes softened. The show was met with confusion, then slow recognition. What Prada understood, and what much of the industry did not yet, was that a certain kind of woman no longer wanted to dress like a man in order to be taken seriously. She wanted intelligence made visible in cloth.

The work that followed over the next two decades established Prada as one of the few designers whose collections could not be predicted. She veered from austere to ornate, from cerebral to surreal, often within the same season. A spring collection might feature floral prints and jewel-encrusted shoes; the following autumn, lab coats and orthopedic sandals. The through-line was an insistence on complication. Prada's clothes were rarely easy to wear, and never easy to read.

Simons, for his part, moved through a series of positions that seemed designed to test the limits of his own vocabulary. Jil Sander, from 2005 to 2012, where he refined his minimalism into something warmer and more wearable. Dior, from 2012 to 2015, where the pressure to produce spectacle — eight collections a year, plus couture — eventually became untenable. Calvin Klein, from 2016 to 2018, where his vision for American fashion collided with corporate expectations and a budget that proved, in the end, unsustainable.

When Prada announced the co-creative directorship in February 2020, the appointment felt less like a rescue than a recalibration. Simons had spent the previous two years working independently, showing small collections in his own time. Prada, then 70, had been running the house alone for more than three decades. The suggestion was not that either needed help, but that the conversation between them might yield something neither could produce in isolation.

Signature

The first co-designed collection, shown in September 2020 via digital presentation, opened with a series of coats. Long, structured, slightly severe — recognisably Prada in their refusal of ornament, recognisably Simons in their emphasis on the shoulder line. The palette was muted: black, navy, camel, grey. Prints, when they appeared, were geometric or abstracted to the point of illegibility. The clothes did not announce themselves.

What has emerged over subsequent seasons is a shared vocabulary built on restraint and, occasionally, its opposite. Spring 2022 featured pastel checks and cropped cardigans that read as almost naïve; autumn 2022 turned dark and minimal, with narrow silhouettes and an emphasis on texture over shape. The collections do not resolve into a single point of view, and that appears to be the point. In an interview with System magazine in 2021, Prada described the process as "a discussion that never ends." Simons, in the same piece, said they rarely agree on first instinct, but nearly always arrive at the same conclusion.

The accessories have followed a similar logic. The Cleo bag, introduced in spring 2021, updates a 1990s archive style with a curved silhouette and an oversized logo plaque — Prada's willingness to reference her own history, filtered through Simons' interest in proportion. The Galleria, relaunched the following season, strips the house's most recognisable tote down to its essential structure: Saffiano leather, double handles, a clean triangular profile. Both have sold consistently, which suggests the market is less interested in revolution than in intelligent refinement.

What follows

The question now, five years in, is whether this model can sustain itself. Co-creative directorships are rare in fashion, and rarer still when both parties carry equal billing. The risk is not that the work will become incoherent, but that it will settle into a formula — Prada's intellectualism tempered by Simons' formalism, repeated until it becomes predictable.

The autumn 2024 collection, shown in February, suggested otherwise. The palette was almost violently bright — acid yellow, electric blue, a red that bordered on orange. Proportions shifted: wide trousers, narrow jackets, hemlines that stopped mid-calf or dragged the floor. It was not, by any measure, a safe collection. Whether it succeeds commercially remains to be seen, but the willingness to risk incoherence feels, at this stage, more valuable than consistency.

Prada and Simons continue to work from separate studios — Prada in Milan, Simons in Antwerp — and meet in person every few weeks to review progress. The process, by all accounts, is slow. Samples are made, discussed, remade. Fabrics are tested at multiple weights. A single coat can take six months to finalise, not because the design is complex, but because the conversation around it is.

In the end, what the partnership offers is not a unified vision, but a sustained argument. Two designers, two perspectives, and the space between them where the work actually happens. Whether that constitutes a signature is, perhaps, beside the point.