The enduring riddle of Miuccia Prada

Miuccia Prada is one of the world’s best-known and best-regarded fashion designers, but this physically unassuming Italian woman remains something of a riddle despite the hundreds of thousands of column inches that have been devoted to her life and work in the past three decades.

Her label might have suffered from a recent profit downturn (down 28 per cent in 2014, according to the Wall Street Journal), but Prada remains the designer label of choice for the intellectual fashion fan.

Prada is a contradiction. She was born to conservative Milanese parents and joined the communist party as a young political science student. In the late 1970s she joined the family company, designing and selling fine leather handbags (given Prada’s price tags, a decidedly unsocialist pursuit).

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A pink Prada suit. Photograph: Catwalking/Getty Images

She met her husband-to-be, Patrizio Bertelli, at a trade fair. He had copied her bag designs and, after giving him verbal what-for on the trading floor, she perhaps decided he had excellent taste and should be awarded a business partnership. Together, they have built an empire.

The most recent addition to this empire is the flagship building of the Fondazione Prada, or Prada Foundation, a home for the immense collection of modern art Prada and Bertelli have collected. The complex, designed by Rem Koolhaas and featuring a bar designed by Wes Anderson, promises to revitalise Milan. Far from being a vanity project, the foundation has laid serious groundwork for eventually becoming a big player in the field of modern art. The first major exhibition, however, is an exploration of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. There's that sense of Prada contradiction again.

Contradictory nature

It is Miuccia Prada’s contradictory nature that fuels the Prada brand; its entire aesthetic is a melding of fashion and art, each season an axis-shifting exposition of banal beauty and jarring ugliness. Much like her customers, Prada designs are not one-dimensional or particularly interested in being pretty. Rather, Prada is interested in being interesting, a noble pursuit that has, until recently, yielded an impressive profit margin.

Her clothing is, as she has said many times, “not for the bourgeoisie”. And indeed, her clothing is not easy or practical or even particularly chic. But it is desirable in a twisted way, coveted by women who want to make a political and artistic statement – and there are more of those women than one may think, given how quickly clunky Prada sock-shoe hybrids sell out.

The queen of bad taste?

Those who would call Miuccia Prada the queen of bad taste would be wrong, though. Bad taste is something kitsch, delivered with a knowing wink. Bad taste revels in its own offensiveness and unseemliness. Bad taste delights in flipping over norms. Prada’s designs do none of those things. They may not be straight-laced, but they are straight-faced.

Take, for example, the most recent autumn-winter collection. The opening looks were straight out of a Swinging Sixties period piece: tight double-breasted peacoats and slim, cropped trousers in luminous shades of chartreuse and blue-grey that ended with the very slightest of kick-flares, jewel-toned shirts and bonded bootees in slightly contrasting blues.

Look more closely and you’ll see that the suits are made of neoprene – wetsuit material – and the bootees bear more than a passing resemblance to the soft surf boots that are more often seen on beach bums than business women. Prada has brought a new dimension to that slightly cliched image of the modern, active woman. And to employ another cliche, it shouldn’t work, but it does.

It takes an extremely smart women to solve a knotty problem, and an even smarter woman, such as Miuccia Prada, to dream them up.

As a feminist at ease with the fashion industry, a leftist who earns almost €10 million a year, and a modern-art lover opening up a new space to classical sculpture, it seems that there is no real resolution or end in sight to the designer’s lengthy affair with complication.

Like life and art, Miuccia Prada does not pose simple questions or provide tidy answers. And that’s just how she wants it.