As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I'm republishing today a feature I did about Prada's 100th anniversary for Russian magazine Look At Me (with many thanks to Fashion Editor Lisa Kologreeva for allowing me to republish it in English on this site).
Mention Prada and your mind will instantly conjure up images of luxurious garments fashionistas all over the world profess to religiously love.
Yet the brand, initially founded in Milan 100 years ago by brothers Mario and Martino Prada as a family-based fine leather goods company, is definitely not just a fashion house, but what could be defined as a “power house”.
Prada is indeed an octopus-like holding, with tentacles extending in different branches, fashion included. It covers art with special projects by its own dedicated cultural institution, the Prada Foundation; it has strong links with architecture - thanks to the flagship stores designed by OMA's Rem Koolhaas and to its collaborations with the architect's own think tank, AMO - and even stronger connections with cinema.
The brand designed costumes for Shinji Aramaki's mecha anime Appleseed: Ex Machina (2008) and more recently for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013); a team of actors including Gary Oldman, Willem Dafoe and Adrien Brody graced its Autumn/Winter 2012 menswear runway, and last year the company enlisted controversial Roman Polanski to direct the Cannes-previewed short A Therapy (and let's not count all the Hollywood actresses who donned a Prada gown on the red carpet throghout the years...).
Prada also dabbled in opera (the Metropolitan Opera's production of Verdi's Attila, 2010), theatre (costumes for Meng Jinghui's Love Utopia, 2011) and sport, designing the Italian sailing team uniforms at the 2012 London Olympic Games (while the achievements of Miuccia's husband Patrizio Bertelli's Italian sailboat racing syndicate Luna Rossa Challenge are well-known in the contemporary sailing history).
More recently the company expanded in the food business buying the historical Milanese pastry shop Cova, though its major achievement remains that of being listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 2011.
In a financially crippled, politically unstable Italy in which women often cover secondary roles, Prada is a terrific success story: last year the Prada group reported a 29% increase in revenue with sales reaching €3.29bn in the year ending January 2013, while Miuccia reached the 67th spot on the 2012 Forbes list of the 100th most famous women in the world.
Yet, roughly 25 years ago, Prada was known for pretty basic nylon bags and not for its 360° lifestyle.
So how did this all happen, does the devil truly wear Prada and is Miuccia an amazing finance genius or an extremely lucky fashion gambler? Let's look at the “making of Miuccia” to find an answer.
After studying political sciences, dabbling in theatre as a mime artist, joining the Communist party and becoming a feminist, Miuccia Prada took over the family business in the late '70s. Shortly afterwards, her now husband Patrizio Bertelli was appointed company CEO.
Expansion started in the '80s and the first successes arrived a few years later, when Miuccia designed basic black nylon backpacks (with a signature triangle logo) inspired by industrial design that soon became the ultimate status symbol. The first Prada womenswear collection debuted in Milan in 1989 (menswear followed in 1995).
Collection after collection, consensus grew among fashion critics and journalists, while loyal bloggers turned in the last five years into devoted Prada supporters and therefore into valuable assets to win the favours of a younger generation of fans.
Many have tried and have miserably failed to make Miuccia confess about the manifold inspirations behind the success of her collections, but the answer is almost too easy to find - a pastiche of the most successful and well cut garments ever designed in fashion history.
Miuccia doesn't have a formal fashion education, she is not a dressmaker or a proper fashion designer à la Gianfranco Ferré, she doesn't draw, but she acts; and she acts by scouting long forgotten pieces - from a coat in a Paris-based vintage shop to a '40s costume in a rare black and white film - and then recreates them without changing a single stitch.
In many cases Prada replicates, re-edits and remixes: it is not a mystery that, if you lock yourself away in a well-stocked fashion archive and start leafing through women's magazines from specific decades, you will at some point stumble upon a Prada look.
In a world in which most designers seem to be taking inspiration from more contemporary sources, this is what has kept Miuccia at the top of the game.
Throughout the years skilled trendspotters saw in Prada's shows visions of Silvana Mangano in Giuseppe De Santis' Bitter Rice and Asta Nielsen in Urban Gad's Zapatas Bande; Jeanne Moreau’s in Joseph Losey’s Eva and Eva Kant in Diabolik; Carmen Miranda in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here and Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's La notte and Joseph Losey's Modesty Blaise (remember those bi-coloured fox furs stole from the S/S 2011 collection?); Jill Kennington and Sophia Loren; W.C. Fields in Monte Brice’s The Golf Specialist and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (albeit that's in Miu Miu's A/W 2011-12, a collection that also contained some references to the costumes in Frank Capra's Long Pants).
The list is long and also includes sunglasses that called to mind Schiaparelli's accessories, boat covers, streamlined optical looks borrowed from Elio Petri's The 10th Victim, collages of Courrèges and Oriental styles and shoes based on the Jean Mazabras for Charles Jourdan/Seducta heel patented in the US in 1981 (Download USD262329).
Funnily enough, the more she remixes, the more Miuccia becomes successful.
Take the new collection presented last Thursday during Milan Fashion Week: hailed as an amazing paradigm of raw elegance by fashion critics, it was actually a sensual remix of the '40s and the '50s updated for the iPad generation that, too often confused by the lure of eye-catching kaleidscopic digital prints and by extremely revealing clothes, suddenly rediscovers real fabrics and the safety of an ordinary coat.
Miuccia is not only skilled at sampling, combining and colliding together different eras, she also manages to defy expectations by being simply unpredictable: the Spring/Summer 2013 womenswear collection mixed Japonisme with flowery furs lifted from the '60s; the next autumnal season will be about cinematic atmospheres taken from a collage of black and white noir films (Fritz Lang's The Big Heat, Robert Siodmack's Phantom Lady, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques...).
The next step is amost too easy to guess: in 2013 there may not be any major events such as last year's Prada and Schiaparelli exhibition at New York's Met, but the anniversary will be celebrated with further expansion into Asia, and no doubts there will be trendy parties at the Venice Art Biennale opening in June accompanied by fashionable art exhibitions at the Prada Foundation's Venetian outpost, Ca' Corner della Regina (expect Francesco Vezzoli to be obviously involved).
Earlier on, during Milan Design Week in April there will be AMO's launch of its furniture line that we saw previewed in prototype format on Prada's menswear runway in January.
Italians are so lucky to be able to predict further movements, though: appointed Director of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition to be held in 2014, Rem Koolhaas will undoubtedly drag Miuccia into it; the architect and the fashion designer are also working on a new contemporary art museum that will open around Milan's Porta Romana area on time for the local Expo 2015 event (expect the uniforms for the Expo staff to be signed by Prada obviously).
There is just one missing link: Prada and Russia. But Rem Koolhaas, director at Strelka, is currently working on Dasha Zukova's Garage Gorky Park so, Moscow-based fashioniasts will get their slice of Prada action - and maybe a slice of its 100th birthday cake - pretty soon.
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