“When I was a girl,” Miuccia Prada confided to Vogue’s Sarah Mower in 2004, “I always wanted to be different, and before the others.” It is a desire that has guided Prada’s life at the creative helm of a multi-billion dollar global brand, one shaped by her protean talents and instincts and by her ability to reimagine what the future of fashion might look like. And so today’s announcement that Raf Simons—innovative menswear designer; alum of Jil Sander, Christian Dior and Calvin Klein—would be joining Prada as co-creative director, with the two famously opinionated personalities will work together to reimagine the brand for the 2020s, seems like a masterstroke of innovative thinking. The move is also a vote of confidence in the power of the creative imagination at a time when the bottom line dominates much of an industry obsessed with exponential growth and number crunching.
“What matters for me is ideas, and the aesthetics are totally secondary,” Prada has declared, but those aesthetics have changed the way men and women have wanted to present themselves in the last three decades, and in Simons she has found an accomplished collaborator—Flemish cool to her Italian warmth, pragmatist to her gut-feeling fantasist—to challenge and inspire.
Although the two design talents have very different backgrounds they share a passion for art, a delight in subversive appropriations of historical dress, and a techno-friendly embrace of the present and future.
Simons has, of course, also worked with Prada and her husband, the company’s volcanic CEO Patrizio Bertelli, before—they hired him as creative director for Jil Sander in 2005 when they controlled the brand—and there has been crossover in their respective design teams. (Bertelli and Prada first met at a trade show where he volubly criticized her offering: they became business partners soon after and eventually married in 1987).
Simons was born in the town of Neerpelt in rural Belgium, “a village between cows and sheep” as he once told Vogue. His mother was a cleaning lady, his father a night watchman in the Belgian army, but his education in taste began with his inspiring aunts who lived in flat-roofed villas with Verner Panton and Eero Saarinen furniture that gave their nephew a lifelong passion for mid-century aesthetics: it’s one that Miuccia Prada shares. Prada was born to a bourgeois Milanese family—her father’s company made lawn mowers for putting greens, her quietly elegant mother inherited the celebrated luxury leather goods company founded by her own father, Mario Prada, in 1913 in Milan’s soaring Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade. (That emporium initially specialized in oggetti di lusso—“luxury objects,” that, in keeping with the taste of the times, included glass from Bohemia and jade from the Far East—but ultimately became known for its high quality luggage, fit for Italy’s royal family).
Prada rebelled against her upbringing, but on her own terms. She did a doctorate in political science, and spent five years studying mime. She was a communist who, she once told Vogue, “used to deliver political manifestos wearing Saint Laurent and emeralds.”
For Prada, clothing design was almost an accidental adjunct to her reinvention of the family brand that she inherited in 1978—it took Bertelli several years to persuade her to branch out from rethinking modern luggage (which she had done by using the resilient woven Pocono nylon previously employed only for coverings to protect the company’s expensive items to make them instead) to reimagining modern ;ilehing. She finally did so in 1988 (MiuMiu followed in 1993). Prada gleefully took on the challenge after she realized that fashion “is a way to be connected to what’s happening in art, design, music—the general culture of the time.” She also disparaged the fashion system of the late ’70s and ’80s and the clothes that she felt were “designed in a commercial way, not a personal way. It seemed fashion was intended for women who wanted to please society—women who were objects.” Citing her admiration for fellow women designers including Vivienne Westwood, Sonia Rykiel, and Rei Kawakubo, her own designs were uniquely subjective. She enjoyed, for instance, an obsession with uniforms and the idea of “dressing like a nun, very sober, without any vanity,” and found that gave her “a lot of confidence … I think it’s very elegant,” she said. “Clothes should always represent your vision of yourself,” she has noted, “or what you want to represent—even if it’s only for one night.”
In those early years, her postmodern approach to design was often informed by the contents of her copious wardrobes. “My learning process is by eye alone,” Prada has averred, “it’s not at all scientific.” Vogue’s Kate Betts noted in 1995 that “every piece of Prada is a Proustian madeleine that Miuccia then processes through her aesthetic, fusing what she absorbs from the present with what she has absorbed from the past.”
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