The Saint Laurent Suit at the Barricades
In May 1968, while students across Europe hurled cobblestones at riot police and the old order shuddered on its foundations, a nineteen-year-old woman marched through the streets of Milan demanding women's rights. She wore an Yves Saint Laurent suit. The contradiction was not lost on her — would never be lost on her, would in fact become the engine of one of the most consequential creative careers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Maria Bianchi, who would later arrange to be legally adopted by her mother's unmarried sister so she could carry the surname Prada, understood even then that the tension between conviction and desire, between political seriousness and aesthetic pleasure, was not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited. "Although I was ashamed of the desire I had for these clothes, I refused to reject this part of myself," she would say decades later, with the calm of someone who had spent a lifetime turning private contradiction into public art.
She was not the only affluent young Italian to drift leftward in those years — "every young kid who was vaguely clever was leftist," she has acknowledged — but she may have been the only one who dressed for revolution in couture. Her comrades wore jeans and sneakers. She wore skirts, antique dresses, the occasional piece from her mother's wardrobe. The pull of beautiful objects was stronger than any concern about what others might think, and this refusal to subordinate instinct to ideology — this insistence on holding contradictions in both hands without choosing — would become the defining gesture of her work. Five decades later, standing in her minimalist Milan office with a Gerhard Richter painting on the wall and the mouth of a Carsten Höller tunnel slide protruding absurdly through the floor, Miuccia Prada still dresses as though every outfit is an argument with itself. A mannish grey coat over a crisp white shirtdress. Grey pearl-drop earrings. A little red crocodile bag crammed with too much. "Not punk in a superficial way," she explains, "but in finding a way to change things, to go against the system."
The system, in her case, was not merely the political order but something more intimate and more difficult: the expectations of beauty, of luxury, of what a woman was supposed to want and how she was supposed to look wanting it.
By the Numbers
The Prada Empire
€4.73BPrada Group net revenues, 2024
82%Miu Miu Q4 2024 retail sales growth
€1B+Operating profit, surpassed for the first time in 2024
$2.1BRaised in 2011 Hong Kong IPO
~€19BMarket capitalization, Hong Kong Stock Exchange (2024)
13,000+Employees worldwide
€1.25BAgreed price for Versace acquisition, 2025
The Grandfather's Trunks
To understand what Miuccia Prada inherited, and what she destroyed in order to save, you have to go back to a leather-goods shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913. Mario Prada — her grandfather, a craftsman of the old school — opened Fratelli Prada with his brother Martino, selling steamer trunks, travel accessories, and handbags of such exquisite quality that within six years the firm had become the official supplier to the Italian royal household. The trunks had more compartments than the Orient Express. The tortoiseshell toilet articles gleamed. This was luxury as the Edwardians understood it: material, tangible, heavy with craft and provenance.
Mario Prada was, by all accounts, a man of fixed ideas — among them, the conviction that women should not be involved in business. The irony is almost too neat. He died in 1958, and his daughter-in-law Luisa — Miuccia's mother, née Prada, an heiress to the firm — stepped in to run the company. Luisa kept it alive for two decades, but alive is not the same as thriving. By the late 1970s, Fratelli Prada had shrunk to a single store. The dedication to craft remained, the products had turned mundane, and the question of whether a third generation could revive a moribund family business hung in the Milanese air like the silver mist that descends over the city in November.
Miuccia — born May 10, 1949, the second of three children, into what she has described as a bourgeois Catholic family — was the least likely candidate for the job. She had earned a doctorate in political science from the University of Milan in 1973. She had joined the Italian Communist Party. She had spent five years training as a mime at Milan's Piccolo Teatro, that small and serious theater where physical expression mattered more than words. She had risen in the feminist section of the Party, distributing leaflets, confronting local government officials, giving speeches at meetings. "Being so involved in the women's movement then, and in everything that it was trying to accomplish, I thought that making bags or shoes or dresses was the worst way I could spend my time," she has said. "I was embarrassed, since most fashion had been such a nightmare for women."
And yet. And yet she had been helping out more and more at the store. Found herself absorbed in questions about its future. Liked it, despite herself, the way she liked the Saint Laurent suits despite herself. "I never actually decided to become a designer," she would later tell The New Yorker's Ingrid Sischy. "Eventually, I found that I was one. I wanted to be something more. But I am what I am. Not everyone can be Albert Schweitzer or Karl Marx."
The Counterfeit King
In 1977, at a Milan leather goods trade fair, Miuccia Prada encountered a Tuscan businessman named Patrizio Bertelli. He was selling knockoffs of her family's products. The origin story has been told in various versions — some say she went to the fair specifically to confront him about the copies; others present it as serendipity — but the essential fact is this: the man manufacturing counterfeits of Prada's goods became the man who would manufacture Prada's future. There is a version of this story, told by one of the sources close to the family, in which Miuccia and Patrizio "immediately found themselves working together without overthinking it. We started and that was that."
Bertelli was everything Miuccia was not — or rather, everything she would not allow herself to be. Born in Arezzo, the son of a family involved in leather manufacturing, he was operationally brilliant, ferociously ambitious, and possessed of the instinct for scale that Miuccia's intellectual temperament might have suppressed. "He was the one who wanted to do something big," she has recalled. "I told him I wasn't ambitious. He replied: 'You're a monster of ambition.' He was right." They married in 1987. The partnership — romantic, creative, commercial — would become one of the most productive in the history of luxury goods, a marriage in which arguments were not a bug but a feature. "We still fight, like we always did," Miuccia told Harper's Bazaar in 2025, "but we have a lot in common, and that has grown over time."
The division of labor was organic but clear. Miuccia would design. Bertelli would build. She would ask the questions; he would answer them with factories, supply chains, retail networks, bond issues, and, eventually, an IPO. "Me and my husband, we never cared — we never woke up and said we have to make money," Miuccia has insisted. "Sometimes we made a little less, so we had to hurry up and fix it, but it's not our ultimate goal. Our goal is to do things well, with passion — the idea of doing good."
But first, she had to make a handbag out of tent fabric.
Nylon and Negation
The black nylon backpack that Miuccia Prada introduced in the early 1980s is, in the history of luxury goods, something like Marcel Duchamp's urinal in the history of art. It is an act of radical recontextualization — a deliberate provocation that forces the viewer (or the buyer) to ask what, exactly, they are paying for.
The fabric was Pocono nylon, a durable, water-resistant material used to make military tents and parachutes. It was emphatically not leather. It was not precious, not rare, not beautiful in any conventional sense. Miuccia first fashioned a line of unlabeled handbags from it in 1979, and the line was not immediately successful — why would it be? The bags lacked the signifiers of luxury that customers had been trained to desire. But in 1985, she relaunched the line with a critical addition: the triangular Prada logo, rendered in gold, and a chain strap that gave the bags a visual resemblance to the more expensive leather Chanel handbags that dominated the era. The logo was doing something new. It was not decorating a luxury object; it was declaring a non-luxury object to be luxury. The authority resided not in the material but in the name.
Sales soared. Actress and model Jerry Hall carried them. The fashion elite adopted them. By the early 1990s, the black nylon Prada backpack had become a fetish object of the art and fashion world — what Vanity Fair would later call the "must-have item" of the era, the thing that provoked Gianni Versace to joke about fashion insiders' "addiction to their little orgasms." The joke was apt. There was something genuinely transgressive about desiring a bag made of tent fabric, something that short-circuited the normal relationship between luxury and material worth. Jo-Ann Furniss, writing in Another Man, would later compare the nylon backpack's influence on the luxury-goods industry to Duchamp's Fountain's influence on contemporary art: "luxury no longer defined by craft and materials, but by ideas."
I was searching, because I hated all the bags that were around. They were so formal, so lady, so traditional, so classic.
This is the paradox at the center of the nylon story: a woman who had spent years distributing Communist leaflets and marching for women's rights was now selling industrial fabric at luxury prices to the global elite. But the paradox dissolves if you understand that Miuccia was not selling fabric. She was selling an idea about what fabric could mean — which is to say, she was selling the same thing she had always been selling, since the day she wore Saint Laurent to a protest: the proposition that aesthetics and politics are not separate domains, that how you present yourself to the world is an argument about the world.
Uniforms for the Slightly Disenfranchised
Miuccia Prada's first ready-to-wear collection debuted in 1988 to what she has described, with characteristic understatement, as a mixed reception. The clothes were austere — parkas fashioned out of nylon, clean lines, muted colors. Critics found them "too classic" for the avant-garde, "too disturbing" for the establishment. "There was always something disturbing," Prada has said, "which is probably what I am, and I like."
She called them "uniforms for the slightly disenfranchised." The phrase is almost impossibly precise. Uniforms — standardized, functional, democratic, stripped of frivolity. Slightly — not the truly marginalized, not the destitute, but the intellectually restless, the women who felt out of step with the prevailing codes of feminine display. Disenfranchised — cut off from power, or at least from the particular kind of power that conventional fashion promised. The collection was, in essence, a translation of Miuccia's own self-contradiction into cloth: the feminist who loved clothes, the communist who inherited a luxury brand, the intellectual who understood that surfaces matter.
The timing was crucial. The 1980s had been a decade of bombastic excess — big shoulders, big hair, overt sex appeal, logo-heavy ostentation. Versace's Mediterranean glamour, Armani's soft power dressing, the general consensus that luxury meant looking rich and wanting to be looked at. Prada's austere elegance stood in deliberate opposition. "Clean, simple lines and muted, basic colors were paired with luxurious fabrics and exquisite tailoring," as Britannica's Jeannette Nolen put it, "to achieve a tasteful look that flattered the figure while preserving modesty." At the close of a decade of excess, Prada's idea of casual luxury caught on, and the brand quickly became associated with confident, intellectual, and affluent working women.
But "caught on" understates the velocity. Within a few seasons, the fashion world was obsessed. Stylists and editors formed a worshipful following. The Prada show became the show you did not miss. "If you want to know what a season is about, you don't miss the Prada show," one fashion director told TIME. "She never follows anyone else's lead, just her own original energy. Her collections are completely an expression of herself." In 1995, Uma Thurman wore a Prada gown to the Academy Awards, and the brand completed its journey from insiders' secret to international status symbol.
What made the work distinctive — then and now — was Miuccia's method of oppositional thinking. She designs against herself. Against beauty, against sexiness, against the very idea of what a Prada collection should be. "Always when I work I say, 'Yes, it's beautiful — but who cares? What is the reason?'" she has explained. "First of all, it has to be a concept. And after, when I get to the concept, very often I will say, 'Oh, let's go home!' Because for me, the work is done. But the transformation of the concept to the reality, that's the tough part."
Ugly Chic and the Stripping of Beauty
In the autumn of 1995, Miuccia Prada presented a collection for Spring/Summer 1996 that combined checkered oilcloth prints from the 1950s with flashes of faux tweed and floral fabric, in colors that should not have worked together: pale brown, Pan Am blue, lurid green, mauve. The look went down in history as "Ugly Chic."
The phrase stuck because it captured something essential about Prada's project — not merely her willingness to use unfashionable materials or discordant color combinations, but her philosophical commitment to dismantling received notions of beauty. "Completely," she has said of the characterization. "It's against any cliché, for so many reasons." She has enumerated them: "First of all it's because there is the political side, which is rejecting that idea, because simply, it is wrong, it's not dignified for women, so you have to be a doll to be beautiful, always the same. That's why I hate bias cut, everything that people think make women beautiful. I'm against that, in principle, from a personal and human point of view. The other reason I am against it is because it is banal."
I want to be more clever, or more difficult, or more complicated, or more interesting, or more new.
This is not mere contrarianism. It is an aesthetic philosophy with deep intellectual roots — one that connects Miuccia's political formation in the Italian left with her design practice, and links both to a specifically Italian tradition of artistic provocation. The fashion critic Bliss Foster has drawn a line from Prada's subversive garments back to Italian Futurism, noting the connection between her nylon backpacks and Marinetti's worship of industrial materials, between her distortion of military jackets and the Futurists' interest in uniforms as sites of ideological meaning. When Miuccia recut a Mussolini-era military jacket for women — transforming the pockets, which had been designed to exaggerate masculine pectorals, into shapes that evoked the female breast — she was performing an act of feminist appropriation that was legible to anyone who knew the history, and merely stylish to anyone who didn't.
Federica Trotta Mureau, editor-in-chief of the Italian magazine Mia Le Journal, has described Prada's accomplishment in terms that capture its scope: she "created a free universe, a sort of experiment without rules... aimed at breaking the codes of fashion." The Ugly Chic collection was the most visible expression of this experiment, but the impulse runs through everything Prada has ever made — from the transparent raincoat that turned opaque when wet, to the souvenir clothes with embroidered moccasins and straw hats, to the perpetually reappearing pleated skirt in all its infinite variations.
The Acquisition Spree and the Billion-Dollar Debt
By the late 1990s, Prada's creative ascendancy had attracted a dangerous companion: the ambition to become a conglomerate. Bertelli, the operations genius, saw what
Bernard Arnault was building at LVMH and what François-Henri Pinault was assembling at what would become Kering, and he wanted Prada to play at that scale. Starting in 1999, the couple embarked on a string of high-profile acquisitions: majority positions in Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, a partnership with LVMH to buy a controlling share of the Roman fashion house Fendi — for which Prada kicked in approximately $225 million — and stakes in other fashion companies.
The strategy was coherent on paper. In practice, it nearly destroyed them. By the early 2000s, Prada Group's annual revenues had risen above $1.5 billion, but the company also carried nearly equivalent debt — roughly $1 billion accumulated from all the shopping. A stock offering planned for 2001, predicted to raise between $6 billion and $8 billion, was supposed to retire the debt. Then the economy imploded. Then September 11. Tom Ford, the designer for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, captured the moment: "On September 11, the 90s ended." The IPO was shelved indefinitely.
What followed was a painful decade of retrenchment. Prada and Bertelli began liquidating their acquisitions, shedding the trophies they had collected with such enthusiasm. The Helmut Lang and Jil Sander houses were sold. The Fendi stake was divested. The press was unkind. The rumors were worse. The company's tribulations became fodder for industry gossip, and Prada — which had been the fashion world's intellectual darling — became a cautionary tale about overreach.
The IPO finally materialized in 2011, not in Milan or New York but in Hong Kong, raising approximately $2.1 billion. The choice of venue was strategic: Asia, and China in particular, represented the company's best hope for growth. For a time, it worked. Chinese customers developed a particular passion for Prada's Galleria handbag, and revenues climbed past their previous peak. But when the Chinese consumer's enthusiasm fizzled, the business stagnated again — for nearly a decade, revenues languished below the 2013 high-water mark.
The acquisition spree is the period that Miuccia's admirers prefer to elide and her detractors love to emphasize. It reveals the limits of her control: for all her creative authority, she could not, by force of taste alone, prevent the company from making the same mistakes that every ambitious luxury house makes when it begins to believe that scale is destiny.
The Fondazione and the Third Life
"Fashion is one third of my life," Miuccia Prada told Vogue in 2023, dividing her existence with the precision of someone who has thought carefully about proportions. "The second third is culture and the Fondazione. After, there is family and friends, and possibly some pleasures." A pause. "Actually, they all overlap."
The Fondazione Prada — founded in 1993 with Bertelli, initially as PradaMilanoarte, dedicated to supporting up-and-coming contemporary artists, architects, and designers — has become one of the most significant private art institutions in Europe. Its permanent home, which opened in 2015 on the southeastern edge of Milan, was designed by Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA. The site was originally a distillery dating back to the early twentieth century; Koolhaas combined seven existing buildings with three new structures to create a campus that is, like Prada's fashion, a juxtaposition of the timeless and the innovative. A gold-leaf-covered "haunted house" stands next to raw industrial sheds. A Wes Anderson–designed café called Bar Luce serves espresso amid intentionally kitschy Italianate décor. The galleries host exhibitions that range from the unsettling (Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud, a profoundly disturbing installation about racial violence) to the playful (Tobias Putrih's interactive environments) to the intellectually ambitious (a climate-crisis show weaving together historical paintings, contemporary art, and scientific data).
Germano Celant, the foundation's director, has described Miuccia's approach: "When it comes to ideas and solutions about art display, Miuccia is definitely one of the most experimental people I have ever met. She never settles for the latest exhibition trend but always aims to achieve more extreme results." A second space occupies a seventeenth-century palazzo on Venice's Grand Canal. Miuccia has lamented the difficulty of finding curators capable of the multidisciplinary ambition she demands — she spent years, she told Vogue, trying to find the right person to oversee an exhibition on feminism, unable to identify anyone who could unite such a disparate field. "I want culture to be attractive," she said.
The Fondazione is not a vanity project. It is, in Miuccia's own framework, the redistribution of wealth through culture — the most leftist act available to a billionaire who remains within the perimeter of capitalism. Whether this resolves or merely aestheticizes the contradiction of a Communist Party member who inherited a luxury empire is a question she has spent her entire adult life refusing to answer definitively.
Raf Simons and the Question of Succession
In February 2020, just weeks before the pandemic shut down Milan, Prada announced that Raf Simons would join as co-creative director, sharing equal responsibility for creative decision-making with Miuccia. It was an arrangement without precedent in the industry — two powerhouse designers, each with a fully formed aesthetic sensibility, agreeing to share the top job rather than merely collaborating once and moving on.
Simons — born in 1968 in Neerpelt, Belgium, trained in industrial design before pivoting to fashion, a man whose conceptual rigor at Jil Sander,
Christian Dior, and Calvin Klein had earned him the status of generational talent — was, in certain respects, Miuccia's natural complement. Both were intellectuals who used fashion as a vehicle for ideas. Both distrusted conventional beauty. Both had a weakness for the young, the awkward, the not-quite-finished. But where Miuccia's sensibility was rooted in Italian history and class politics, Simons's drew on youth subculture, art-world conceptualism, and a particularly Belgian austerity.
"Here, the creative is the owner," Simons told AnOther Magazine in 2024, identifying what made Prada different from every other house he had worked for. "It's a completely different psychology — and that makes a big difference. That's not to be critical of others... but it's different when you are a creative director for a brand that is no longer anything to do with the original owner." Miuccia, seated beside him, was blunter: "It becomes business, pure business."
Their collaborative method — they speak several times a week, sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing, always circling toward something neither would have reached alone — has produced collections that critics have described as among the most intellectually compelling in contemporary fashion. The Fall 2024 collection, with its scaffolding set design and maze-like runway, deliberately deprived the audience of perspective — "the fleeting present," as Miuccia put it. Models came out fast, many looking bookish, several with moppy curls, as though cast from a liberal arts college in Vermont. Cathy Horyn, the most formidable fashion critic of her generation, wrote: "The more I look at this mousy Prada collection, the more I think it's subversive."
The partnership is widely understood as a succession mechanism. Miuccia, now seventy-six, has said she will "continue to work for as long as she wants." But the appointment of Andrea Guerra as the group's first non-family CEO, the transfer of Lorenzo Bertelli's stake in the family holding company to 50.5 percent, the gradual professionalization of the management team — all of this points toward a transition that the family is engineering with the same deliberation Miuccia brings to a collection. Bertelli, with characteristic gallows humor, told the Business of Fashion in 2021: "In three years, statistically there's only a ten percent chance I'll be alive, so it's normal to think about these things." He was exaggerating — the average life expectancy in Italy is eighty-one — but the urgency was real.
The Miu Miu Miracle
The most improbable chapter in the Prada story is not the nylon backpack or the Communist-turned-billionaire arc or the Versace acquisition. It is the fact that Miu Miu — named after Miuccia's childhood nickname, launched in 1992 as a younger, more affordable, freer sister line — has, in its fourth decade, become one of the fastest-growing luxury brands on earth.
The numbers are startling. In 2024, Miu Miu's retail sales surged 82 percent in the fourth quarter alone. For the full year, the brand's growth was so explosive that it now accounts for 15 percent of Prada Group's total sales, up from 12 percent in 2022. In the first quarter of 2025, sales rose another 60 percent. The EBIT margin improved to 22.5 percent of revenues. The Lyst Index named it
Brand of the Year for 2022. On social media, Miuccia is referred to by Gen Z admirers as "mother" — the highest term of endearment a young audience can bestow.
The acceleration began during the pandemic lockdowns, when Miuccia — working with super-stylist Lotta Volkova — began radically retooling the brand's identity. The critical shift was from demographic to psychographic: Miu Miu stopped being "the young Prada" and became, in the words of its CEO Benedetta Petruzzo, a brand that "speaks to a universe of people" defined by "youthful energy linked, not to age, but to attitude." The casting broadened — Gigi Hadid, twenty-eight, walked alongside Kristin Scott Thomas, sixty-three. The silhouettes sharpened: low-rise pants, scandalously short skirts with visible pocket linings, strapped ballet flats. "I have to decide every morning if I am going to dress as I was as a 15-year-old girl or the lady I am today," Miuccia said after one show.
The point is you can choose what you wear. I have to decide every morning if I am going to dress as I was as a 15-year-old girl or the lady I am today.
The Miu Miu miracle has a lesson embedded in it that goes beyond fashion: the most powerful growth vector in the Prada empire is the one over which Miuccia exercises the most personal, least mediated creative control. "Miu Miu has always had a strong potential," Petruzzo has said. "It's the most free expression of Signora Prada." The formula works precisely because it is not a formula. Miuccia once described the relationship between her two brands with a sentence that functions as a kind of kōan: "Prada is what at the end I am, and Miu Miu is what I would like to be."
Versace's Homecoming
On a Thursday in late February 2025, when asked by journalists whether Prada was pursuing an acquisition of Versace — the flamboyant Milanese house that had passed into American ownership when Capri Holdings purchased it in 2018 — Miuccia Prada offered a characteristically oblique response: "Versace is on everyone's table. I don't know how it will end."
It would end, as such things often do, with a number: €1.25 billion, announced in the spring of 2025, to bring Versace back under Italian ownership. The deal — risky, ambitious, structurally complex — was vintage Bertelli: a calculated bet on a distressed asset purchased at a price low enough to permit enormous upside if the turnaround succeeds. Versace's revenues had declined 15 percent in the third quarter of its fiscal year; the brand had hiked prices into a consumer downturn; S&P had downgraded Capri to junk. Prada was buying a patient it could afford to nurse back to health.
The acquisition marked a shift in the couple's long-stated philosophy. As recently as May 2024, Andrea Guerra had denied that Prada was in the market for new brands, insisting the company wanted to focus on organic growth. But Guerra also said he foresaw "more consolidation within the luxury sector" and was "committed to investing in its home turf of Italy." The Versace deal satisfied both impulses — consolidation and patriotism, strategy and sentiment. For the Italian fashion press, the word that recurred was homecoming.
Whether Miuccia Prada — the woman who broke the codes of beauty, who made nylon luxurious and ugliness chic, who went to demonstrations in Saint Laurent — can perform the same alchemy on Gianni Versace's legacy of Mediterranean maximalism is a question the industry will be watching for years. "The industry is in a reshuffle mood that is not close to being finished," Guerra told investors in early 2025. "This is a period where we can — and are, with great performance — win market share, because we have stability on one side, but we are full of creativity on the other side."
The Morning Ritual of Destruction
There is a detail from a 2019 Business of Fashion interview that captures something essential about how Miuccia Prada works. She was describing the process of designing evening dresses — a form she finds repellent because of its associations with clichéd femininity — and what she said was this: "Every morning, I see those dresses and I strip away a piece of beauty. When they are too beautiful, there is an instinctive force in me."
An instinctive force. Not a reasoned objection, not an intellectual commitment, but something closer to a physical reflex — a flinch at beauty that arrives before thought. This is the engine that has powered forty-seven years of design, and it runs on a fuel that is distinctly Miuccia's: the productive discomfort of a person who loves the thing she distrusts, who spends her mornings systematically destroying what she built the night before, who once told Vogue that she was "super-conflicted" about being a fashion designer "because I was thinking I was doing a superficial job."
The antidote, always, was the process itself — the sparring and talking, as the late writer Ingrid Sischy put it, the friction between concept and cloth. "If I have a dream, I want to achieve it, so it's an objective or a direction," Prada has said. "Something that has a strange beauty of who-knows-what-it-is, I really detest." She does not want mystery. She wants meaning. And meaning, for her, is always the product of contradiction — "there has to be a thing and its opposite. I have to team a sexy look with a pair of masculine shoes and a scruffy polo shirt, and so on. Maybe it's a way of expressing complexity. It's absolutely my defining characteristic, and it's part of the Prada DNA."
Her private life has been, by the standards of fashion's usual exhibitionism, radically ordinary. She still lives in the house in Milan where she was born. Her friends are the same ones she has had since school. Her children, she has said, "discovered I was a famous designer when they were about 12 years old. They didn't know it before because my life is normal." She refuses to have her homes photographed. She cooks risotto for guests — traditional Milanese, saffron-scented — and serves cold champagne, which she insists on calling "sparkling wine." The vegetables come from her garden in Tuscany, and yes, she takes a close interest in the planting.
This is not humility performed for public consumption. It is the same instinct that makes her strip beauty from dresses every morning: the conviction that surfaces must be distrusted, that the visible must be tested against the real, that the worst thing a person can do — or a handbag, or a hemline — is to be merely what it appears.
On a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, where the Prada Foundation occupies a palazzo that has stood since the eighteenth century, a seventy-six-year-old woman in a red silk coat from her very first collection — 1988, the year of the scandal, the year of the parkas, the year the critics said she was too much and too little at once — removes her heavy gold necklaces, one of them bearing lions' heads, and lays them on an adjacent chair, as if relinquishing the chains of office. Then she picks up a spoon and begins serving rice.
