Being Creators: Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, T Magazine China, December 2023

Cover story for the T Magazine China featuring an interview with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons on their ongoing collaboration.

Published December 2023

Extract

In Spring 1988, Miuccia Prada, then head of accessories at Prada, the luggage brand founded in 1913 by her grandfather and great uncle, Mario and Martino Prada, was preparing to make her ready-to wear-debut with the brand’s new womenswear line.

The year before, she had married Prada’s new CEO, the imposing Tuscan Patrizio Bertelli, while wearing a man’s coat and a bespoke military-inspired green dress by Ferrari, a popular luxury childrenwear brand run by two sisters. Her somewhat unusual life before this event has now become the stuff of fashion legend. She trained as a mime at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro. She received a doctorate in political science. She was a feminist activist and a member of the Italian Communist party. She was certainly not the typical fit for the world of 80s Italian fashion, where beauty and sex appeal ruled supreme. And yet her seventy-piece collection marked Prada’s transition into a “fashion” company. It was, like her wedding-ensemble, an ode to uniform. Models looked like twisted school girls. They wore lace-up brogues and clumpy flats; skirt suits with a boxy fit and pleats; boyish tailoring in chocolate brown and navy. Their cardigans were lazily draped over their shoulders. They walked with crossed arms – a look that suggested assurance, perhaps even a slight ambivalence about the context in which they found themselves: a catwalk show. The cast included various “real” women, including Prada’s doctor’s daughter. The overall mood was one of conviction.

Recently, the designer Raf Simons, who, in 2020, was appointed Miuccia Prada’s co-creative director at Prada, has found himself thinking a lot about that very first show. “In the early collections, the DNA of Prada is already visible. Already in the first shows, it’s immediately there,” he told me recently.

At the time, back in 1988, Simons was living in Genk, Belgium. Then just twenty, he was studying industrial and furniture design. Though he met weekly with a group of fashion enthusiasts to discuss style and design, the show passed him by, and Prada would not enter his radar until the mid-nighties, when Miuccia Prada was attracting attention for her smash hit accessory, the black nylon backpack, which bucked the trend for flashy leather goods. By then the twisted classicism that had dominated her first show was being discussed by critics as “minimalism”, a word used mostly for the lack of a better term to describe the clarity of her vision (no fuss, no wrought romance). Prada pieces had a warped formality, they rejected stuffiness but toyed with appropriateness, etiquette, refinement and class. (“I remember Rem Koolhaas talking about me, and he said, I am not minimalist I am baroque,” Mrs Prada tells me, laughing).

Come 1995, Simons founded his own label, which, like Prada’s backpack, catered to a sort of anti-luxury. His menswear company became known for hoodies and skinny silhouettes and – as with Prada – clever plays on uniform: school boys, office workers, soldiers, subcultures. These obsessions continued right up until the label’s closure in 2022 and, throughout, Simons talked of preferring to show attitudes, rather than clothes. He spoke to outsiders and would-be outsiders, those who felt a desire to reject the mainstream, to pursue arch individuality. Simons recounts to me a formative experience from when he was a young man: he attended a party in a new designer sweater and found another boy from his class dressed in the same knit. He was so disturbed by this that he left the event immediately, he says. Even just retelling the story seems to bother him afresh – he bristles at the memory.

Later, Simons became known for his own kind of uniform – usually sweaters with slim trousers – many of which he bought from Prada. “It’s been one of the only brands I’ve ever worn since many decades,” he tells me. This is unlike the majority of other designers who, for reasons of taste and advertising, tend to exclusively wear their own clothes (Mrs Prada herself only wear her own designs – usually a knit with sleeves that hit the elbow and a knee-length skirt with some kind of amusing shoe or ironically gaudy piece of jewellery). With Mrs Prada’s decision to appoint him her co-designer, Simons’ role shifted from client to creator, taking on responsibility for conjuring the elusive energy of intellectualism and ease that had attracted him to the label in the first place.

The reason Simon is so preoccupied with Prada’s history is partly simply his appointment – nearly all designers, bar a handful of the particularly egotistical, spend time revisiting the house archive when appointed to the top of a brand – and partly preparation for a new exhibition, the second incarnation of the Pradasphere (the original, a smash hit, opened in May 2014 at London’s luxury department store Harrods). Opening on 7 December at the Start Museum in Shanghai, this large-scale exhibition will be something of a retrospective of Prada as a fashion house, and simultaneously a dynamic mixed media installation, uniting art, film, architecture – all areas of interest for Mrs Prada, and all areas that Prada works in through the Fondazione Prada, which opened in the mid 90s, and which has since shown a plethora of global artists, photographers and filmmakers. Simons alone will be in charge of selecting the fashion. There will be some 500 pieces on show, and he plans to pay particular attention to the house’s earliest collections. “I saw a lot in 1988 and 1989 and 1990 which, in every day that I experience Miuccia, is still the most relevant for her – a certain styling, a certain kind of playing on reality,” he says. Looking at those initial shows, he was intrigued, he told me, both by individual garments – the oversized flats, the neat button- throughs – and the general sensibility. “Miuccia, she pokes the bourgeoisie, all the time,” he says. “In the first shows, there are a few dresses, that are out of fit on purpose. She might use materials that are loved by the bourgeoisie, like taffeta or satin, but they will be out of fit, because she liked to poke, she liked to be individual and say this is how I like my dress, and it doesn’t fit the way it’s supposed to when you are in that world, but it’s how I like it.” –

Simon’s appointment at Prada caused a commotion. Though fashion journalists tend to talk of things being ground-breaking, they are rarely actually shocked – this appointment shocked them. Part of the surprise came from the unprecedented nature of the arrangement (it is rare in fashion, an industry that prizes hierarchy and ego, where designers are often viewed as “Gods and Kings”, as Dana Thomas famously put it in the title of her 2015 book on Galliano and McQueen, for anyone to want to share the applause). Vanessa Friedman writing in the New York Times tried to convey the gravitas: “Imagine Mark Zuckerberg naming Elon Musk his co- chief executive, or Steven Spielberg declaring that from now on he would co-direct all of his films with George Clooney.” Further intrigue surrounded the pragmatics of how the whole thing would work – would Simons and Mrs Prada work on the collections together? Or would this mean Mrs Prada would be stepping away from designing? What would happen to Prada’s little sister brand Miu Miu? The answers have since become clear. Yes, no and, as for Miu Miu, Mrs Prada handles that collection alone and it’s thriving (sales jumped 50% this year, the Prada Group announced recently). A few weeks before we speak, Simons and Mrs Prada presented their S/S 24 Prada show: models wore boxy shirts and jackets with mini shorts and pencils skirts, and large quantities of pink slime dripped from the concrete ceiling onto the floor as they walked. Sales at Prada are also thriving. Mrs Prada – as she is reverently known with the fashion and art worlds, over which she rules like a high priestess (her shows are keenly watched by other designers and the general mood of a season cannot be measured without understanding what she is exploring, what nuance or concern she is entangled with) – conceived of her debut 1988 show, like most of her shows, as an amalgamation of truths and instincts. She was philosophising on desire – what we like, why we like it, what we want to say about ourselves and how fashion can help amplify that. Her references, she explains, were “pieces of history” – say, garments from her own wardrobe or even work by other designers, to which she played clever homages, twisting their signatures into new forms. “For me, pieces of history were pieces from the lives of people,” she said. She sees this process of looking back as a way of philosophising on the present, on the nature of who we are – a vision of self through analysis of decisions, references, property. “It’s not nostalgia, but we are what we are because of what we know. We come from our past. It’s the knowledge of your history,” she says. The show was about actual life, actual people, she explains – hence the casting of her doctor’s daughter.

Today, both Mrs Prada and Simons are on Zoom from Milan. Simons is in the Prada offices – his background is metallic and industrial – while Mrs Prada is at home, sat behind a desk. A large work by Alberto Burri hangs behind her. Her hair is pulled back neatly. She laughs readily – a warm conspiratorial chuckle. “I have a lot of humour. I am very human, very maternal. I really like people. It’s a part that people don’t know about me,” she tells me, at one point.

Throughout our conversation, Mrs Prada makes a habit of gesturing with her pen when making her points, tapping it on the desk to assert the importance of things. “I think if there was one thing that I did it was introducing life and the complexity of life into the fashion world,” she says. “It was said that I introduced what they called the bad taste, but really what it was life. Real life was in movies, was in art – around there is life, good and bad – but fashion it was this kind of stupid, isolated cliché of banal beauty, the beauty of women.” She adds, “I never did a bias-cut dress, because, for me, that was the symbol of trying to be sexy. Still now, fashion can be about beauty, the cliché of beauty.”

Simons surveys her on his screen. “Is it very funny to see you sitting there in that blue shirt,” he says. “One of the first looks [from the 1988 show] is a white shirt, with a skirt and a belt and a flat shoe with a heavy sole.” The look still works, he says. “If you go today in the world, and you see many women who wear Prada, they have that kind of ease and they have that kind of look.”

Simons is the most talkative of the pair. He speaks passionately, laughing often, but also frequently furrows his brow as he tries to work things out out loud. Famously sensitive – memes of him tearful, at the end of shows, often do the rounds of social media – he cares deeply about doing things well. He is alarmed by inauthenticity, and by some of the norms that have overtaken his industry as fashion has swelled into a pop cultural juggernaut, managed by conglomerates and watched by a global audience. The relentless cycle of press and events scares him. He has the skittish sincerity of someone figuring things out as they go, while Mrs Prada – more inclined towards playful asides and firm, neat statements – has the easy confidence of someone with nothing to prove.