144 |Harper’s BAZAAR|September 2014IMAGES: COURTESY PRADAINTERVIEW
The
M
ilan, late May: the design home of Miuccia Prada never looks more like
a factory in an Italian neorealist fi lm than it does in the off-season between
shows. Sunshine fi lls the courtyard of the sprawling complex. In a corner an
industrial-size chute loops in a spiral from a window to the ground.
It’s actually a slide by the artist Carsten Höller. A zippy escape route? That
might qualify as a subversive joke, since normally the fashion world is
beating a path to get in to see Miuccia. We meet upstairs in a conference
room next to her offi ce; a light lunch, which will include wine (she partakes),
has been set out. She immediately offers condolences for the recent death of
my partner, and we spend several minutes talking about him. This is not strange, and yet it is.
Although I have known Miuccia for 20 years – I’ve convinced myself that I can remember my very
fi rst Prada show (pale crepe de chine dresses, a 1940s Berlin essence) – we are not close. I’ve visited
her home, a loft-like apartment in the same building where she grew up, only once – to write an
article about her and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli’s, art interests. I see her backstage at her shows,
like everybody else. To the extent that I know Miuccia, it is through her clothes, though, clearly,
that is saying a lot. As Michael Rock, a graphic designer who is a frequent collaborator, says,
“Miuccia has excelled at making her own questions the subject of her work.” For autumn, there
is a distinct anti-fancy attitude in plain silk dresses and the pairing of rough shearling coats with
wispy ’20s-style chemises. And because she was born in 1949, the culture of Europe in the ’60s
and ’70s is never far from her mind. But while she may watch all of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s
fi lms to get inspired, the process for Miuccia is never that direct. At one point she tells me,
in earnest, “Maybe I should
change my life. There are
people who are happy with
little. And us, we are never
excited with anything, or
never enough. We’re very
ambitious. That complicates
your life, but it’s also the fuel
of it. People with a simple life
can be happy too.” She laughs
a bit ironically. “Rich people
need to be entertained more
and more. And then I think,
‘Let’s not entertain anymore.
Let’s be simple.’” Does she
mean it? Maybe, maybe not,
but such soul-searching
speaks to her particular gift.
Very few designers have her
ability to dig under your skin.
She makes you care about
clothes, and I, for one, hate
them. Of course, that’s her
ambivalence too. And her strategy. She knows how to make something feel a certain way. A few
random impressions of Milan’s foremost agitator: she doesn’t wear her intelligence for all to see.
She’s more modest, or simply shrewd. Nonetheless, she is mentally quick, like a bird in a lusty dive
toward a piece of food. She listens as much with her eyes as her ears, and she keeps you, at all
times, under her talon gaze. Her humour is the dry kind, with a chortling, deliver-me-from-this
laugh. And while she is intensely competitive – she makes no bones about being out to smother
her near-and-dear peers with a great Prada show – she lacks the instinct, common in fashion, to
put you down. She will at least consider what you have to say because she questions everything.
I mention, as we are passing platters of salad and spinach timbale, that I’ve been volunteering on
a farm. I am, needless to say, curious how this will be received. Miuccia, though, merely nods and
fi lls her plate. “Farming is an option,” she says, interested. “I actually like the country very much.”
Then, perhaps thinking of her garden in Tuscany (she and Patrizio have a home there, as well as
one in the Swiss mountains), she adds, “I realise I have no patience with my hands anymore. I’ve
become manually impatient – the hands don’t correspond to the speed of the mind. If I can’t do
it in one second, I don’t have the patience to redo it.”“WE’RE VERY
A MBITIOUS. TH AT
COMPLICATES
YOUR LIFE, BUT
IT’S ALSO THE
FUE L OF IT ”
➤
Prada A/W14