For the journalist used to the Gatwick Express and EasyJet, delivery into the
lavish embrace of Prada is somewhat disconcerting. “I could get used to this,”
you think, even as you worry that your shoes are all wrong, that your bag will
fool no one, being neither new season nor vintage. At the 18th-century Palazzo
Prada (its real name is Ca’ Corner della Regina, though only rarely does anyone
seem to use it) on the Grand Canal in Venice, no fewer than four black-suited
young men are on hand to greet me: one to help me from water taxi to jetty,
another to spirit away my luggage, and two merely to smile at me. “Please,” says
a PR, leading me through the palazzo’s exquisite rooms (since 2011, these
heavenly spaces have been used by the Fondazione Prada to display art). “Do go
upstairs, where a buffet lunch will be served.” A buffet? Well, yes, the food is
indeed arranged on a table. But when I approach a dish of gleaming asparagus –
it’s so perfect, it might as well be by Manet – a waiter practically dives into
my lap. If I’d like to sit down, he will bring me everything that I require.
It is the first week of the Venice Biennale. This lunch, doubtless one of
dozens of similar gatherings around the city, is to celebrate the opening of
Portable Classic, a new show at the palazzo which explores the miniature copies
of classical sculptures that were such status symbols in later centuries.
Needless to say, it’s a hot ticket. Who doesn’t want to be close to Miuccia
Prada, an increasingly powerful figure in the art world?
Loitering, glass in hand, at one end of the room, I spot plenty of big names,
Anish Kapoor and Carsten Höller among them – though it’s only when I clap eyes
onHans Ulrich Obrist, the itinerant and irredeemably well-connected curator and
co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, that I know this is really the
place to be. Obrist, of course, is already deep in conversation with our
hostess, Mrs Prada – everyone calls her Mrs Prada, even those who have worked
with her for decades – who slipped into the palazzo without fanfare a little
earlier, and for a while I watch the two of them. While he is animated, arms
windmilling wildly, Prada cuts an altogether quieter figure. Small and
(unexpectedly) blond, she is a wearing a white cotton dress with a pleated
skirt. In her hand is a silk drawstring bag. In her ears are antique garnets or,
more likely, rubies. On her feet are the kind of flat sandals, navy and white,
that your granny wore at the seaside.
Two hours later, as the lunch is winding down and the diamonds and Chanel
bags begin to exit the room, Prada approaches me and asks if I wouldn’t mind if
we talked here, at one of the dining tables. It seems she has not yet had a
chance to eat pudding and, sure enough, a waiter now puts in front of her a dish
of panna cotta and roast peaches, an espresso (which she sends back, on the
grounds that it is not hot enough) and some sugary biscuits. She eats quickly
and greedily, and thanks to this, I warm to her – though it’s her face that
really invites you in. Tanned as a nut, she wears no makeup, not even a slick of
balm on her lips, while her expression is set somewhere between sombre and
quizzical. It’s clear immediately that she couldn’t care less what I’m wearing;
her eyes coolly meet mine, and never wander, not even to my (long-pondered and
moderately daring) brooch. It’s as if she’s about to give me a tutorial.

In her home city of Milan, the Fondazione Prada has just opened a vast
“campus” for art on the site of an old distillery close to a railway line. I saw
it the day before, and gasped at its size, its ambition, its severe industrial
minimalism (even the children’s play area is grey and white). At 19,000 square
metres, its collection of exhibition spaces – one is several storeys high and
called the Haunted House, another is a grotto deep underground – is twice the
size of Renzo Piano’s newWhitney museum in New York, and at least three times as
elegant. Designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and filled mostly with
work from the permanent collection of the Fondazione Prada, it has been received
with some rapture by the critics, and with some gratitude by the Milanese, who
will doubtless continue to make good use of its retro cafe – a 50s fantasy in
green vinyl designed by the film director Wes Anderson – irrespective of whether
they ultimately fall for the charms of Damien Hirst’s Lost Love (a
gynaecologist’s chair in a large aquarium the artist made in 2000) or Nathalie
Djurberg’s The Potato (a walk-in fibreglass tuber complete with purplish eyes
that dates from 2008).
But is the woman who conceived it triumphant, over the moon, high on a
combination of acclaim and relief? No, she is not. Only with the greatest
reluctance, it seems, would Prada ever describe herself as pleased. “I’m always
thinking about the next thing,” she says, her mouth turning down. “So I don’t
enjoy anything.” But it’s so generous, her city of a gallery, with its square,
its library, its cinema (visitors will be able to spend the day there for €10).
She shrugs. “Well, I don’t feel generous. The result is maybe generous, but I
didn’t start with that. I started with an idea, which was to do something that I
think is important and relevant. I wanted to make culture attractive to the
young [so that they would see] that it is necessary to your life. My intuition –
and after many years, I realise that my main quality is intuition – was that it
would be good to have a place where people could live with ideas.” Culture, she
insists, must come to be perceived not as an extra, as a form of “decoration”,
but as deeply useful. In what way useful? “It can answer political and even
existential questions.”
She and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, the chief executive of Prada,
established the Fondazione Prada in 1993, and it was only after this, she says,
that they began buying art. “We had to learn, and quickly. Until that moment, my
cultural background was in literature, politics, cinema, theatre and dance. Art?
I was never interested in it.” So who did they buy first? “Nino Franchina [the
Italian sculptor and painter] was probably the first… ” She grimaces. “You know,
you look and you study and you like it and you appreciate it and eventually you
buy it. That’s not very noble, the buying part, but I have to confess it. I grew
up with the idea that art is for everybody and not a matter of private
ownership, but sometimes you want to have it.”
Happily, she finds she’s now less interested in buying than before: when I
tell her, for instance, that the loveliest things I saw during my visit were the
two boxes by the American artist Joseph Cornell displayed in a 15th-century
marquetry studiolo-cum-sideboard, her reply is unsentimental. “I’d always liked
Cornell, but I bought those because I wanted to have something to put into the
studiolo,” she says.
Her resistance to – or embarrassment about – the concept of ownership extends
to the word “collector”: she and Bertelli may own some 900 pieces of
contemporary and modern art, but she flinches if you use the term in her
presence. “I hate the idea of being a collector,” she says. “I really hate it.
I’m not a collector.” Nor is she willing to be described as a patron, for all
that she is well known for commissioning artists (no interview with Prada is
complete without mention of the Carsten Höller slide by which she may, if she so
chooses, depart her office at night). “As much as I don’t feel like a collector,
I’m even less a patron. I am and want to be an active part of shaping culture,
but I am patronising nothing. I hate all of that. I don’t want to be perceived
like that, which is why we never sponsor exhibitions.” So what is she, then?
“When I started becoming friends with the artists, there was a shift. It was
like sharing personal problems.”
Crikey. Building galleries and commissioning work is some way to share
personal problems, not least because, however she likes to describe it, it
brings with it such responsibilities: she has it in her power not only to make
or break a career, but to influence the market. Does this ever make her anxious?
“I can’t speak about the market,” she says. “But it is a problem in every field:
the hunger for the new. In fashion, everyone wants a genius, and in another few
days, they want another. It’s really bad. The problem is that people think an
artist has only one great period. But we all live longer now: an artist can have
a comeback.”
Prada and Bertelli have always strived to keep their fashion business and
their interest in art quite separate. I think this has to do with their fear of
vulgarity. They would hate anyone to think the Fondazione Prada was simply
another, albeit more esoteric, way of selling handbags. But even so, the two
realms must influence each other. How could they not? She smiles. “Yes. I prefer
that they don’t in principle. But of course they do. I’m very proud of my job
[as a designer]. I used to be ashamed of it because I was educated, I was a
feminist. But finally, I am proud of it. I earn my own money, which is a huge
thing for a woman. The speed of fashion has taught me so much, and it’s a very
open world by its nature. Movies, music: we need culture for our job. This speed
is useful in the art world, and for sure the art world is useful in my job. It’s
such an obvious collaboration, and deep down my life is one. Every man and woman
wants to dress well. That’s how they express themselves.”
She can’t believe the snobbery that exists around fashion. “It’s an
injustice,” she says. But isn’t it the case that some people also take it far
too seriously? It’s only frocks, after all. For a moment, she is silent. Perhaps
I’ve offended her. But then she breaks into laughter. “Actually, I don’t care,”
she says. “I really don’t care at all!”
In Milan, I went on a pilgrimage – or at least a research trip – to the
original Fratelli Prada store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which
Miuccia’s grandfather, Mario, opened in 1913. Mario made travel goods for the
Milanese elite: in 1918, his collection included a lizard bag with marcasite and
a buckle of lapis lazuli. But the chief object of interest in his shop’s
hallowed windows was not a trunk or even a bag, but a socking great pair of
sunglasses made of wood and leather and bolted together with metal staples.
Bulky and unwearable, I almost laughed out loud when I saw them. They were so
hideous, and yet I longed for them, an unnerving kind of covetousness that Prada
has been inducing in customers and window shoppers alike since the early 90s
(she inherited the business in 1978, but did not begin making clothes until a
decade later). As Giorgio Armani has occasionally complained, her designs are
“sometimes ugly”. Nevertheless, in her hands, such “bad taste” is chic.
According to Forbes, Prada’s annual sales currently stand at $4.65bn.
She took over at Prada reluctantly. Fashion, business: these weren’t her
things at all.
Having earned at doctorate in political science from the University of Milan,
in the mid-70s she studied mime at the city’s Piccolo Teatro under the legendary
director Giorgio Strehler; she also joined the communist party, whose leaflets
she is said to have distributed while wearing Yves Saint Laurent. Even now, she
insists it was only thanks to Patrizio – the couple met at a trade fair; at the
time, he also had a leather goods business – that she moved from bags into
clothes (he told her that if she didn’t do it, he would have to bring in a
professional to design a collection). “I really have no idea where it [her
determination] comes from,” she says. “Someone once said to me: Miuccia, you are
a monster of ambition. But it’s not that. My best quality is my instinct. When
people ask: ‘Are you happy it turned out like this?’ I say: ‘Bah! I don’t know.
I never had a goal.’ I act and I react. I have a special guide inside me.”
Does she ever doubt her instincts? “So far, I trust it.” Only once has she
sent out a collection and thought: uh-oh. “It was many years ago, my third show.
I invented vintage. Now, vintage is normal. But then, it wasn’t. WWD [Women’s
Wear Daily, the industry bible] wrote that it was like the Flintstones meets the
Jacksons, which to them was the biggest insult, but to me was the biggest
compliment. Anyway, it was completely unsuccessful.”
Her success, like so many things about her, is paradoxical. “I was never
classical enough for the classicists, and never avant-garde enough for the
avant-garde. It was always uncomfortable, I always did something wrong.” But she
pressed on, and in the end, it was this very wrongness – oh, those ridiculous
wooden sunglasses – that came to be acclaimed.
Prada is 66, but she can’t ever see herself giving up fashion; not even the
art world could lure her away. “My work keeps me grounded. It’s the place where
I really know what people want. Of course, it’s more complicated now. Before,
the world was small. Until the 80s, it was mainly white and western and
Eurocentric. Now, you have to face the big picture. It’s globalised.” At the
Fondazione Prada in Milan, there will soon be a dance programme, and its
choreographer would like those who take part to perform naked. “And this is the
Hebdo and Houellebecq problem. How can you insist on your own culture if you
want to open up to the world? You have to start a kind of censorship. You must
compromise. The political correctness of today – in the US, you can’t even show
a nipple – I feel very deeply. People take offence so quickly. But if you
believe in coexistence, you may have to give up something that’s yours. If you
don’t, you may end up back in medieval times.”
I wonder if she feels things are going backwards in other ways. How does a
70s feminist like her feel about the pressure on women to look permanently young
and taut? Wouldn’t she like to use her influence to do something about it?
“First of all, I had this problem – worrying about looking old – when I was
33 and thank God I got over it and it never came back. Second, we will arrive
there. The world is ageing, so from a commercial point of view, eventually
people will start saying: it [being older] is fantastic. You won’t convince
people with [older] models, but when each of us really believes in ourselves,
and feels good and beautiful and sexy and secure, that will be it. And in any
case, if we work who cares? If you don’t work, of course you think about the
problem of your wrinkles from morning until night! If you work, you have
something better to think about. That is the beginning of every possible kind of
pride, and with those women [who don’t work] I really have no conversation.”
Love and work… that’s all there is. Freud, she agrees, was right about this,
and the two cannot really be separated. “If you don’t work, if you depend on a
man for your bread, how can you be happy? If you are young and blond, maybe he
will love an older one with black hair. So just live your life. This is so
obvious. I think women can go on having lovers until they are 100.”
Why is it still so hard for women to be the boss? Partly, she believes, this
has to do with the issue of children, and whose job it is to look after them
(her sons are grown-up now, but she was “privileged” enough for childcare not to
have been too much of a problem). But it also connects to something more
elusive.
“Women are complex, but command is very simple. Maybe that’s it. Also, as a
woman, sometimes you want to be weak. It’s almost a pleasure. It comes from your
traditional past. We interiorise sweetness, delicacy, protection: all those
qualities of women. Why can’t we say we are clever? There is something
wrong.”
Will a jacket or a dress change your life? She laughs out loud at this idea.
“I can tell you that it won’t,” she says.
All the same, it strikes me as rather odd – or perhaps I just mean unfair –
that the woman, arty and bookish, Prada seems to have in mind when she designs
is also the kind of person who, in reality, would be least likely to be able
afford her clothes. What are her more impoverished fans (I’m not saying I’m
among them, or not out loud) supposed to do? She thinks for a moment. “I don’t
know what to say. It is undemocratic. If you can afford it, you can, and if you
can’t, you can’t. I would say: wear vintage. I would say: be strong and proud.
Look chic with something less expensive. When I struggle, I feel good because I
am not passive.”
Life, she thinks, is about ideas not jackets – though this is easy for her to
say. When she gets up to leave, I notice her sandals all over again, and though
she is irrefutably wearing the shoes of a Scarborough landlady dressed for best,
it’s finest Venetian terrazzo over which she scoots, not a flowery fitted
carpet.