Happy birthday Miuccia Prada ❤️
It is early November and silver mist has descended over Milan but the– a spirit-lifting, almost metaphysical place – is all the more romantic and beautiful for it.
“Art, culture, intelligence and ideas should make life more interesting, more beautiful, more fun, they should be a pleasure, not a duty, they should be something that makes you more happy” Miuccia Prada It has become almost clichéd to describe what Prada wears but her personal sense of style – fairly or unfairly – has always been part of, or even central to, any analysis of her character and sometimes from the most unlikely sources. Here’s Max Sirena, former skipper of Luna Rossa, the Prada sponsored yacht, who since November last year has been with the Board of Emirates Team New Zealand but who worked with Prada and Bertelli for over two decades.
Even by her own elevated standards – and Prada’s standards, her wish to push fashion forward while expressing rather more universal concepts are second to none – last year was one of grand thinking and equally grand designs. In February she showed a womenswear collection she described as an exploration of “the history of women”.
Six months later and, as is so often the case, Miuccia Prada’s current collection represents a radical about turn. Backstage following the Prada womenswear Spring/Summer 2017 show in Milan in September, she said this to journalists who hang on her every word : “I was trying to find a new sort of elegance. Elegance sounds like such an old fashioned word, but there’s also the sense of something meaningful, deep, cultivated.
“People are more and more preoccupied by history,” she continues. “You see it in every field. We need consideration of our past because of what we have to face so it’s a very natural thing. This past 20 years, since the 90s, I think, or even the 80s, in every field people have become obsessed with the past. Obsessed? Probably curious is a better way of putting it, wanting to learn. I never really studied history because I find it hard to retain names and dates though I tried many times.
As for simplicity, it is true that there is a sense of both the clean and the contemporary throughout this collection but that is just what it is, an idea.
“At the start, there was Versace, there was Armani, and everything was much more loud than what Miuccia was doing,” Zambernardi continues. “No one paid much attention. The attention started to happen when the shows became a little more out there with ideas and concepts that seemed more shocking, shocking in the use of wrong materials, the use of nylon no longer just for bags, the exploration of ugliness versus beauty.
And it’s an aura of independence that her clothes bestow on to those who wear them. “Prada to me means a brand that intellectuals, creatives, visionaries and bon vivants feel comfortable clothed in,” says art consultant Shala Monroque. “What is special about Mrs Prada is that she is a woman with a very clear vision without much compromise and the language with which to communicate that vision masterfully. Once she believes in an idea she is behind it 200 per cent.
Above all, “Prada is an institution, it’s institutional because it’s a huge brand,” Zambernardi says. “But it is also total anarchy, it has an anarchic approach to elegance and to fashion. Miuccia to me is an anarchist but she’s conservative. The beauty of it is that you have to have that background to be free, to be anarchic, to be wrong. It makes everything believable.
If Prada is, in her own words, very “democratic”, nothing is left to chance, and everything ultimately starts and finishes with her. The casting of both her womenswear and menswear shows is almost as hotly anticipated as the clothes. In particular the first model out for women’s shows is scrutinised, setting the bar for other designers and fashion editorials internationally for seasons to come.
Prada graduated from La Statale in Milan with a doctorate in political science in 1970. “I barely put a foot in that university,” she says now. “I only went to school to take my exams. I studied maybe 10 to 15 days before the exam, the minimum effort needed to pass it. I had to take a degree for my parents so I chose the easiest possible one. I always passed. I don’t even know how. The only good thing I did was my thesis. That was really good.
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