Miuccia Prada

With the possible exception of Martin Margiela, the Belgian Garbo of fashion, no designer is as diffident as Miuccia Prada about her métier. This makes sense, given the background of the woman born Maria Bianchi Prada in May 1949 — as a former performing mime at Milan’s Teatro Picolo; a onetime member of the Italian Communist Party; an ardent feminist in her university years (she has a doctorate in political science); and the unlikely inheritor of a family luggage business founded by her grandfather, Mario, in 1913.
Miuccia Prada’s decision to enter fashion came about in 1985, when she persuaded her family firm to produce a series of black nylon handbags and backpacks, conspicuous in an era of overblown logo clothes and designer statements for their modesty and low-key labeling. Quickly taken up by a cognoscenti undaunted by the steep prices of what were after all generic nylon totes, the Prada bag became an insider’s badge of belonging, and a nod by fashion’s early adopters to a newly constituted and democratized form of luxury goods.
A designer with no formal design background or needle skills, Ms. Prada has distinguished herself with her eccentric and unconventional uses of pattern, shape and (often high-tech) fabrics, her avid explorations into pop cultural realms few designers navigated as boldly and her provocative relationship to the traditional markers of femininity in dress.

Yet it was not until 1989, four years after her bags appeared, that she considered herself ready to present a full-blown ready-to-wear line. She termed the austere collection “uniforms for the slightly disenfranchised,” and put her stamp on what would become a global franchise based on intellectualized dressing that became chic by being anti-chic.
She has continued to bewitch fashion insiders and the public through aggressive aesthetic experimentation; her forays into perverse color combinations and patterns; her revitalization of dated materials like astrakhan and boiled wool; her knack for offhandedly pairing sexy stilettos with thick wool socks, fur helmets with sleek cocktail dresses, tiaras with clothes meant for the workplace; her bold way of appropriating classic designs from treasures in her archives (one season it was beaded bags and tourist straw hats); and her open distaste for the increasingly constricting dictates of fashion.
There have been missteps, including a buying spree she and her business partner and husband, Patrizio Bertelli, went on in the 1990s, acquiring established labels like Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, ventures that proved unprofitable; and that, before they were divested, hindered the Prada label’s effort to take the company public, an effort still underway.
The couple also embarked on ambitious building sprees in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, hiring world class “starchitects” like Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron.
Perhaps in reaction to her background (Prada was the premier luggage maker for the Milanese elite), her style is marked by a reflexive urge to defy the status quo. More than her formal experiments with style, it is her engagement with the mutating outlines of class that make her one of Italy’s most compelling cultural exports.
“I hate fashion,” she once said. “I also love it, of course,” she added, and the reason was typical of her approach. “Everyone, no matter how poor, has to get dressed, and the way we think of ourselves, the way we compose ourselves every day, for me this is very profound.”