The Great Fashion Designers (44 page)

Grandfather Mario Prada founded Fratelli Prada, an Italian leather goods business, in 1913. Miuccia was born Maria Bianchi in 1949 to Luigi Bianchi and Luisa Prada and had an isolated childhood for reasons that are still unclear but which culminated in her being adopted by her mother's sister in adulthood. By the time she reached university in the late 1960s, the student wave of political activism was at its height. Miuccia, with a PhD in political science in her sights, was captivated by the energy of the period, signing up to the Communist Party and becoming fully engaged in the fight against capitalism. She has played down this period in interviews: ‘I was young in the Sixties, when Italian society was first becoming obsessed with consumerism, but my big dreams were of justice, equality and moral regeneration. I was a Communist but being left wing was fashionable then. I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.'

However, she had another side to her intense personality—that of the bohemian with a creative streak, dressing in Yves Saint Laurent for a student march, studying mime at Milan's Teatro Piccolo. All this changed in 1978 when she took over Prada, which had been run by her mother following her grandfather's decision to step aside after World War II. Progressing to the family business was a tough move, she recalled. ‘You know, I had to have a lot of courage to do fashion,' Prada recalled, ‘because in theory it was the least feminist work possible. And at that time, in the late Seventies, that was very complicated for me. Of course, I liked it a lot but I also wanted to do something more useful.'

Miuccia Prada's impact was not immediate. For seven years, she learned the nuts and bolts of her new trade, developing experience and confidence with the support of Patrizio. She did not sketch, preferring to work at a conceptual level, and then building a collection from there. The breakthrough came in 1985, when Prada sidestepped the family heritage in leather and produced a collection of heavy-duty nylon bags that became must-haves for fashion editors the world over—with their readers in hot pursuit just a step behind. The handbag was reborn as a key fashion accessory, while nylon was rediscovered as a fashionable material. The nylon bags rapidly turned the Prada label into a fashion powerhouse, although it was another four years before Miuccia launched ready-to-wear in 1988. Her first collections received a mixed response, but by the end of the decade were setting the tone for a new spirit of minimalism, following on from a decade characterised by excess and extravagance. ‘The reason Prada works is because it whispers, it doesn't shout,' she has said. ‘If you want to be recognised wearing my clothes, you can be. And if you don't, you don't have to be.'

But sometimes Prada could shout—regularly, her collections oozed a sense of a designer challenging her own instincts, attempting to work against her own notions of good taste, as if embarked on an intellectual exercise for personal stimulus. ‘It's very easy to know what I like and it's very easy to do
what I like. But I tend to have, let's say, good taste,' she said. ‘This is very boring for me. So, basically, I have to work with what I think is bad and wrong. In my company they're always worried about that, everyone is always complaining.' Prada says she is rarely interested in a look. She works on a concept, often referencing the past, but resolute about making it contemporary. For her spring/summer 2009 collection, she drew criticism for sending the models down the runway in python-skin platform heels (some of them fell over). The clothes them-selves—'cave-woman couture', she called them—were still more provocative, deconstructed, mixed up, crinkled and rumpled. It was an exercise in sophisticated seduction that puzzled and excited her audience in equal measure.

With her interest in other creative forms, Miuccia set up the Prada Foundation in 1993 to showcase leading contemporary artists. Outside her office window, she installed a playground slide that descended three levels; this playful touch was in fact an art work by Carsten Höller. She also worked with leading architects on her stores, including Rem Koolhaas for New York and Herzog & de Meuron for Tokyo. An installation, titled
Waist Down
, which toured Asia, America and Europe in 2005 and 2006, highlighted both her seriousness and playfulness with its focus on skirts designed by Miuccia, including her popular circle skirts. In 2008, she commissioned a short animation,
Trembled Blossoms
, to mark the spring collection, a lush landscape of flowers and nymphs with suggestions of Art Nouveau, Liberty and Aubrey Beardsley. Other projects have included temporary architecture-specific wallpapers, environments and interactive media for the Prada Epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills and Tokyo in a series of collaborations.

The fashion business grew simultaneously. A second label, Miu Miu (her nickname), was launched in 1992, bringing the Prada vision to a wider audience. Prada Sport followed in 1994. In the late 1990s, Prada Group joined in the enthusiasm of the time for acquisition, snapping up an extraordinary portfolio of labels, including three of the most admired designers of the era—Austria's Helmut Lang, Germany's Jil Sander and France's Azzedine Alaia. This marriage of talents proved disastrous: Sander resigned twice as the business that bore her name struggled to break even, while investment was unsuccessfully lavished on turning Helmut Lang into a superstar. Prada Group hinted at a stock market flotation on a number of occasions in an effort to put its finances back in order, only to cancel time and time again. When the global economic crisis erupted in late 2008, Miuccia Prada was left lamely musing that maybe her business was not the kind of business that was best suited to the financial markets. The more high-profile scrutiny of the markets would certainly not be to her tastes. Prada herself avoids the celebrity circuit. ‘I am a very private person and don't like the high-profile nature of the fashion business. It's dangerous to have such a large public image and I'm not as interested as some designers in becoming famous because it would take away the realities of my life.'

She has adapted more enthusiastically than many of her contemporaries to the speeding up of the fashion system in the early twenty-first century. This trend was driven by the fast fashion of mass-market companies such as Spanish retail brand Zara. As a young woman, Miuccia Prada was content to develop an idea that could be relevant for six months. By 2008, however, she commented that an idea might satisfy her for two days. The turnover of ideas has become ferocious, she acknowledged. ‘My goal now is to change our stores every two months—that's what I would like.' An eloquent interviewee, Miuccia Prada has made comments over the years that reflect the insecurities that many people working within the fashion industry share as to the true status of their chosen profession. Her brilliance has been to turn this insecurity to powerful use through a series of inspirational collections, driving forward fashion to its current status as a key component of modern popular culture.

Further reading:
Miuccia Prada speaks eloquently about her own work, so interviews with her are frequently illuminating. Vanessa Friedman's interview for
Ten
(autumn 2000) was particularly incisive. Susannah Frankel spoke to her in ‘The Feeling Is Miuccia' (21 February 2004) for
The Independent
. Alessandra Galloni wrote ‘The Designer Defends Prada' (25 January 2007) for
The Wall Street Journal
.

The emergence of the Belgian designers in the late 1980s was one of the more unexpected twists in fashion history. A country with no great reputation for creativity produced not simply one but a veritable profusion of design talent, spawning a movement that continues to throw up surprises into the twenty-first century. Top of the list from the original wave was Martin Margiela, who showed new ways of wearing familiar clothes, drawing on inspiration from flea markets and introducing a new kind of fashion that was swiftly labelled deconstructionist, with a stripped-down functionalist aesthetic.

Although not one of the so-called Antwerp Six, who first showed their work collectively at London Fashion Week in the mid-1980s, Margiela is regularly categorised together with his fellow Belgian near-contemporaries (the most influential of the other six was Ann Demeulemeester, and the most commercially successful was Dries Van Noten). The Belgians all imbibed the earnest hard-working fashion aesthetic of their college, Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Art, developing outstanding technical skills coupled with a high seriousness in their approach to fashion design. Antwerp, at the heart of Flanders, was also the centre of a broader cultural boom, reflecting the rising confidence and dominance of the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium.

Margiela's high seriousness was approved in France, where the conceptual approach to fashion design has always been respected. An exhibition staged in Rotterdam in 1997 featured a collaboration between the designer and a microbiologist. Margiela chose one outfit from the eighteen collections he had made to date, recreated in white, then sprayed with mould and yeast and allowed to grow. Another snapshot of Margiela's approach: in spring 1998, he produced a collection full of flat garments inspired by the shape of plastic supermarket shopping bags. The seams were cut so that the clothes could lie flat, demonstrated in the show by men in white coats carrying around the clothes on hangers. A season later, he showed T-shirt dresses on ten life-size wooden puppets, with the folds heat-bonded to polythene vinyl. All this was a fashion conceptualist's heaven. Likewise, the stores, usually in backstreet locations with no name above the door, have become cult locations. A recurring feature of the shops is a line of thrift store sofas and chairs, covered by one continuous white slipcover. Footprints on the white carpeting are stamped with one of Margiela's signature Tabi boots dipped in black ink. The previous life of the store location is respected; thus, in Taipei, where Margiela opened in a former fast-food restaurant, the burger bar's original fixtures were retained and simply painted white.

Martin Margiela was born in 1959 and grew up in Genk in the Limburg region of Flanders. After studying in Antwerp in the late 1970s (some years before Demeulemeester, Van Noten and Dirk Bikkem-bergs), he initially found work designing raincoats for a Belgian firm and then briefly worked in Italy. But Margiela's heart was set on the higher planes of creativity and for him there was only one place to learn—Jean Paul Gaultier, the great iconoclast of Parisian fashion, who was at the peak of his influence in the mid-1980s. Margiela applied several times for work at Gaultier's studio; sheer persistence eventually got him through the door. Margiela
left Gaultier after three years to set up his own business with friend Jenny Meirens, who had run a boutique in Antwerp. The business was financed on a shoestring through well-paid commercial work for Italian manufacturers. For all the uncompromising aesthetic of his own label, Margiela was from the beginning a highly versatile designer, as was made clear a decade later in 1998 with his appointment as womenswear designer at the house of Hermès.

Margiela's early collections instantly intrigued buyers from Europe's more avant-garde stores, although few placed orders. His first collection featured the exceptionally narrow shoulder—Margiela called it the ‘cigarette shoulder'—which was a statement of defiance at a time when 1980s power dressing ruled. In October 1989, he caused a sensation by showing his collection on a rubble-strewn wasteland in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. The models stumbled down a makeshift catwalk with eyes painted white, wearing plastic dresses, papier mâché tops, jackets with the sleeves ripped off, skirts apparently made from lining materials and oversized men's trousers. It was an experimental tour de force, making the mainstream shows of the Paris season seem blandly conventional. Geert Bruloot, owner of Louis, an Antwerp store, was an early supporter and friend: ‘It was a shock, but it was also a revelation. Margiela smelt what was coming, what was in the air. He was looking seasons ahead, taking the most everyday kind of clothes and showing new ways of wearing them.' Other designers, such as Helmut Lang and Jean Colonna, were also presenting a challenge to the major fashion houses, following the challenge that Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto had presented several years earlier. The deconstructionist designer believed in showing precisely what he was doing, with hemlines unfinished, stitches visible and even the tailor's markings retained. Fashion, he believed, was not an art—it was a craft, ‘a technical know-how' for the wearer to explore and enjoy.

Drawing inspiration from flea markets or street style, Margiela would turn sometimes ordinary clothes into fashion by mixing and changing the shapes and fabrics. In the process, he challenged conventional ideas of what fashion could be, showing new ways of wearing familiar items. He also took little notice of the pressures of the modern fashion system to come up with new ideas every six months, preferring to refine and develop concepts over several seasons, revisiting garments again and again. His autumn 1993 collection displayed the breadth of his influences and his willingness to acknowledge his sources, including a dress made from four black flea market dresses sewn together and a nineteenth-century priest's coat that the designer liked so much he did not tamper with the original design. In 2001 cultural studies academic Rebecca Arnold argued that Margiela's approach ‘undermined the notion of designer as unique, individual creator, by conceding that each design is the product of fashion's history.' She saw Margiela sharing the same spirit as Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo, recognising imperfection as ‘a route to authenticity … in contrast to fashion's traditional role as the purveyor of ephemeral, perfect fantasies.'