“I like the idea of commerce very much because it’s where you prove that what you are doing is meaningful,” shares Miuccia Prada.
The Prada menswear presentation for next spring was accompanied by excerpts from the soundtrack of the film. Shown here modelling her own archive for LOVE, Miuccia lets us in on the conceptual and cinematic themes that drive her brands, and how she turns these big ideas into business.
It is with a mixture of emotions then that one notes what she is wearing: a denim coat and headband that are a simultaneously understated but tangibly authoritative combination, and a pair of black sandals adorned clusters of what looks like clear costume jewellery but which might, for all I know, be the crown jewels of some vanished empire.
So when one of the defining visionaries of contemporary style says she’d prefer not to look at peoples’ appearances too closely, how, one wonders, does she go about designing for them? "The CONCEPT," she answers, "the IDEA!" These, she explains, are at the crux of things. To imagine that she sits down to consider the nature of a specific item is, she says, a categorical misunderstanding of the whole affair. "First is the idea.
Here, as elsewhere, freedom is a relative concept. For all the seemingly divergent interests of the business, from the array of items that bear its name and the name of other brands it has either shared, started or acquired, to the arts and projects made through its ‘Fondazione,’ Prada insists there are strict parameters to what she does.
So in case of emergency, break gender? She smiles at that, but in a way that suggests she’s allowing an over-simplification. “I imagine myself into character,” she explains. “Inside I am acting. When I really don’t know the answer in my bed in the morning I think and I start fantasising. When I don’t have an answer the only way is imagining myself.
Talk of power and clothing brings up the idea of uniforms: the Italian police, I venture, have much more adventurous uniforms than their British equivalents. Again, she frowns benignly. “In England, usually with uniforms you are good, because you have the Queen, the King, the people outside the palazzo…There is a tradition, a great tradition in dressing in England, much more than in Italy.”
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