The workroom is not what one expects

The workroom is not what one expects. No mood boards, no bolts of fabric stacked like a library. Just a long table, fluorescent light, and Miuccia Prada in a navy cardigan, turning a sleeve inside out to check the seam allowance. She does this often, according to those who have worked with her — examines the interior before considering the exterior. It is a method that extends, one suspects, beyond garment construction.

Prada began in 1913 as a leather goods atelier in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, founded by Mario Prada and his brother Martino. The original house specialised in trunks and handbags for Milanese clientele who travelled by rail to the lakes or the Riviera. Walrus leather. English steamer trunks. A royal warrant from the House of Savoy. The sort of enterprise that thrived on discretion and repeat custom, not innovation.

Mario's granddaughter, Miuccia, inherited the business in 1978. She had a doctorate in political science, a background in mime, and no formal training in fashion. What she did have was a conviction that luxury, as it existed, had calcified. The house was profitable but minor. She began with nylon.

The Pocono, and what it meant

The Vela backpack appeared in 1984. Black nylon, minimal hardware, a small enamelled triangle bearing the Prada name. Nylon was, at the time, associated with military surplus and sportswear — not with houses that held royal appointments. Miuccia used pocono, a densely woven industrial fabric milled in Lombardy, originally intended for army tents. It was water-resistant, near-indestructible, and utterly without the patina that luxury goods were meant to acquire.

The bag succeeded not despite this, but because of it. It appealed to a customer who understood luxury as a form of knowledge rather than display. The triangle logo was small enough to miss. The bag's value was encoded, not announced.

By the late eighties, Prada had moved into ready-to-wear. The first collections were shown in a basement space on Via Fogazzaro. Miuccia's approach was, and remains, adversarial. She has described her own taste as "bad taste" — not in the sense of vulgarity, but in her attraction to the awkward, the mis-scaled, the slightly off. A print that clashes. A hem that doesn't resolve. Proportions that require a second look.

Patrizio Bertelli and the architecture of scale

Miuccia did not build Prada alone. Patrizio Bertelli, whom she married in 1987, managed the business side with a degree of control that bordered on the obsessive. He oversaw production, distribution, licensing. Under his direction, Prada acquired Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, and Church's. Some of those acquisitions worked. Others did not.

Bertelli also commissioned Rem Koolhaas to design the Prada Epicenters in New York and Los Angeles — retail spaces that functioned as much as installations as stores. The New York location, opened in 2001, featured a wooden wave that served as both seating and display. It was striking. It was also, by most accounts, commercially unworkable. The wave has since been removed.

What Bertelli understood, and what allowed Prada to scale without diluting, was that the brand's value lay in its intellectual positioning. Prada was not about heritage in the traditional sense — it had heritage, certainly, but that was not the product. The product was a point of view. And a point of view, unlike a logo, cannot be easily counterfeited.

Miu Miu, and the problem of the younger sister

In 1993, Miuccia launched Miu Miu, named after her childhood nickname. It was intended as a secondary line, less severe than Prada, more given to whimsy. In practice, Miu Miu has become the more culturally visible of the two labels, particularly in the past decade.

The Miu Miu collections are where Miuccia allows herself a degree of playfulness that Prada, with its intellectual armature, does not easily accommodate. Micro skirts. Ballet flats with ankle straps. Cardigans worn as tops. The clothes read as spontaneous, even if the construction is anything but.

In recent seasons, Miu Miu has outperformed Prada in both sales and cultural traction. The brand's autumn/winter 2022 show, held in a Paris hotel ballroom, became one of the most widely discussed collections of the year. The set was minimal — rows of chairs, a mirrored runway. The clothes were precise and slightly perverse. Leather bloomers. Shrunken jackets. Skirts that sat low on the hip in a way that felt both retro and destabilising.

One could argue that Miu Miu has become the main line in all but name. Whether that troubles Miuccia is unclear. She has said, in interviews, that she designs both collections simultaneously, and that the distinction between them is less strategic than emotional. Prada is the argument. Miu Miu is the aside.

The handover, and what it signals

In 2020, Prada announced that Raf Simons would join as co-creative director. It was a significant move, not least because Miuccia had never shared design authority. Simons brought his own vocabulary — minimalism inflected with youth culture, a fascination with subcultural codes — but the partnership has been, by most measures, coherent.

The collections they have produced together do not feel like compromises. They feel like conversations. A Simons silhouette — clean, architectural — appears alongside a Prada print that resists easy categorisation. The spring/summer 2022 show featured uniforms that were not quite uniforms, in fabrics that shifted between matte and shine depending on the light. It was rigorous without being austere.

Miuccia is now in her mid-seventies. Patrizio Bertelli stepped down as CEO in 2023, succeeded by Andrea Guerra. The question of succession is no longer theoretical. What happens to a house built on one person's intellect when that person is no longer present?

Prada has, arguably, prepared for this more carefully than most. The Simons appointment was not a coronation but a transition structure. The Prada Group has diversified — it now includes Miu Miu, Church's, Car Shoe, and a stake in the cashmere house Loro Piana, though the latter was sold to LVMH in 2013. The business is robust. The question is whether the sensibility can be institutionalised.

What remains

Return to the nylon. Prada re-issued the Vela backpack in 2019 as part of its Re-Nylon project, using regenerated nylon sourced from ocean plastics. It was a gesture towards sustainability, yes, but also a reminder that the original bag was never about luxury in the conventional sense. It was about utility reconsidered.

That reconsideration — of what luxury means, of what women want to wear, of how a brand can grow without becoming generic — is Prada's signature. Not a specific silhouette or fabric, but a willingness to resist the expected. Whether that can survive its founders is the question the house now faces. The answer will not be sentimental. Miuccia would not allow it.