by Dana Thomas
She told one of her attentive assistants to bring her a pot of fennel tea, which she poured delicately like a proper English lady, and reluctantly told me a bit about the roots of her family and her company. Her grandfather Mario Prada came from a family of civil servants. “They must have had money, because they traveled,” she said, and Mario soaked in the luxury lifestyles of Europe’s upper classes. In 1913, he opened a shop called Fratelli Prada with his brother Martino in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a late-nineteenth-century shopping concourse next to the Duomo with mosaic tile floors and a domed glass roof. With the help of La Scala’s set designer Nicola Benois, Mario decorated the shop like an English aristocrat’s library, with rich woods, brass railings, and leather-bound books. Miuccia Prada told me that, contrary to the oft-recounted tale, Fratelli Prada was not a luggage shop or “travel company,” like Louis Vuitton, but a boutique that specialized in “luxury objects.” Indeed, the door of the Galleria shop still has the original sign, which reads Oggetti di Lusso (Objects of Luxury). “He went to Vienna to find the best leather for cases, Poland for crystal for bottles,” she said. “He sold watches and evening bags. He worked with artists as well as artisans.” She showed me images of some of his products: a small lizard handbag with a marcasite-and-lapislazuli buckle from 1918, a black silk handbag with a hand-carved ivory monkey clasp from 1925, a toadskin wallet with a silver flower from 1927, a tortoise and enamel watch from 1938. “He had very grand ideas,” she said.
Miuccia said she doesn’t know how the shop weathered World War I, but it did, and sometime afterward Martino got out of the business. Mario opened a second shop on the nearby Via Manzoni, not far from La Scala. The company survived World War II, too, though Mario did close the Via Manzoni store then for good. After that, Miuccia became vague about family details. She claimed it was because she’s not interested in the past, which may be somewhat true: the only thing historically referential in her designs is the little enamel triangle label, which is based on her grandfather’s trunk labels. Her reticence could stem in part from her traditional upbringing. But I felt there was also a bit of mystery, something the family—or at least Miuccia—was hiding. When I pressed her on it, she bristled and answered hesitantly, if at all. What she wouldn’t tell me, I discovered from sources close to Prada.
Mario married a woman named Fernanda—Miuccia wouldn’t tell me her name—and they had two daughters, one being Luisa, Miuccia’s mother. (Miuccia wouldn’t tell me her aunt’s name either.) Sometime in the 1940s, Luisa married a man named Bianchi, “from a wealthy, eccentric family,” Miuccia said. She wouldn’t tell me anything further about him—if he worked, if he supported the family, if he underwrote the company—except to repeat that he was “eccentric.” She wouldn’t even tell me his first name. “My mother would be very upset. She would think I’ve already said too much,” Miuccia explained. His name, I later learned, was Luigi, and everyone called him Gino.
The Bianchis had three children, Alberto, Marina, and Maria—who later became known as Miuccia—and they lived in a four-story, late-nineteenth-century palazzo on the Corso Porta Romana where Miuccia, as well as other family members, still resides today. When I asked then why she was Miuccia Prada, and not Miuccia Bianchi, she said, “My name is Miuccia Bianchi Prada. Some women keep their name. It’s done in Italy.” In fact, according to sources at Prada, Miuccia Prada was officially named Maria Bianchi until the late 1980s, when she had her elderly unwed maternal aunt adopt her, thereby officially changing her name to Miuccia Prada.
After World War II, Mario Prada lost interest in his business, and it continued on unremarkably until 1958, when he died and Luisa took it over. The notion of a married, haute bourgeois mother of three working in a shop was unthinkable in Italy at the time. Miuccia explained it this way: two businessmen actually ran the shop and “my mother worked there. It was her little thing on the side.” When I asked Miuccia if she ever helped out—ringing up sales, sending out orders—she looked at me incredulously. “I was a student,” she said in a tone that made it clear that students of her rank did not work, even part-time in the family shop. Miuccia remembers going to the Galleria boutique once or twice in her youth. “It was not a woman’s place,” she said firmly, though it was—at least in theory—her mother’s shop. Her father, Gino, had little if any involvement with the company or the shop. At one point he produced lawn mowers for golf courses.
Her mother’s “little thing” limped along for another twenty years, draining the family’s finances. “We passed from being rich to being just well-off,” Miuccia told an Italian paper. Finally in 1978, the twenty-eight-year-old Miuccia took over, and she was about as unprepared as one can be. She had a doctorate in political science from the University of Milan and had studied five years with the Piccolo Teatro to be a mime. Her only luxury experience was living it: she was a fashion addict, wearing Yves Saint Laurent, Biba, and André Courrèges. She had moral objections to taking over the business: she was a feminist and a communist, albeit an Yves Saint Laurent–wearing, haute bourgeois feminist communist who had never worked a day in her life. “I loved fashion like mad, but I didn’t like it as an idea,” she told me. But then, she reasoned, the company “wasn’t clothes, so it wasn’t frivolous.” When I asked her why she thought she could run a company without so much as one class in business management or one day of on-the-job experience, she waved off the question like an annoying gnat.
A year into it, she nearly threw in the towel. Then she met Patrizio Bertelli, a leather goods manufacturer from Arezzo, in Tuscany. Fashion legend has it that she caught him at a trade show in Milan in 1978 selling cheap knockoffs of her bags, legally pursued him to stop, then decided to bring him on board to handle her manufacturing instead. I asked her to recount the tale, and she came up with another one altogether. Bertelli—she always calls him Bertelli, never Patrizio—came into the Galleria shop and told her, “Why don’t we work together?” She was taken by his “acute eyes” and said she’d think about it. “Probably had I not met him,” she continued, “I would not have gone on. I couldn’t have bought a factory then. Now I could do it, but then? A woman opening a factory? I didn’t see it as very possible. He had a factory. He was already doing it. He had everything. So I could do the creative side. It took the company immediately to another level.” When I asked about the trade show story, she said tersely, “I knew his company. I met other people, then him. I don’t know if I noticed him there or met him in the store.” The couple’s relationship evolved rapidly from businesslike to romantic. They lived together for eight years, then married in 1987 and had two sons.
What is clear is that Bertelli pushed Miuccia to do things she would have never done otherwise. Within a decade, Miuccia Prada was overseeing the design of shoes and women’s wear, which was often inspired by her bourgeois upbringing and tastes. In the mid-1990s, Prada launched Miu Miu, which was a secondary, more youthful line, as well as men’s wear and Prada Sport—all, Miuccia insists, against her will. “Shoes, I didn’t want to do them,” she told me. “Clothes either. I never wanted to do more.” When Miuccia balked, Bertelli responded, “Fine, then we’ll do them without you.” And that, Miuccia says, was “impossible” for her to allow. In retrospect, she is pleased he pushed her. “If I had only done bags I would have been bored,” she says now. “You enlarge your mind, you learn more.”
As Miuccia tells it, she has always struggled to accept what she does for a living. “It’s a very big conflict,” she explained. “I am tempted to say what is luxury: servants and sixteenth-century service. If you want to talk about rare beauty, I know what that is. To fake luxury today is easy. You put some details from the brand’s past, you put a little bit of gold, and that’s it. I can’t bear that…Real luxurious people hate status. You don’t look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It’s all about satisfaction. I think it’s
horrible, this judgment based on money. It’s all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn’t bring you anything. It’s so banal.”
At one point, Miuccia was nearly saved from her daily torment: she was asked to run for the Italian parliament, though of course she wouldn’t tell me when or by which party. She chickened out. “I’d have to stop doing my work,” she explained. “Can you imagine a famous designer doing politics?” I was about to mention that the porn star Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, served in the Italian parliament in the late 1980s, but I bit my tongue.
AS MIUCCIA PRADA reluctantly designed clothes, shoes, and handbags, Patrizio Bertelli focused on the business side of Prada. His method was absolute control through fear. He is a short, stout man with a bulldog face and well-trimmed wavy white hair. He wears mod retro glasses—like Peter Sellers but more narrow—which make him look like a hip intellectual. He is not known to have a sense of humor, and his temper is legendary. He explodes at the slightest mistake, “and not for one minute but for half an hour,” remembers one former staff member. No one ever speaks back. Except Miuccia. They can fight like cats and dogs all day at the office, then go home together for dinner.
Bertelli is involved in every company detail: he has chosen the company’s stationery, dictated the menu in the employee cafeteria, and personally hired much of the staff. When he opened the American subsidiary in New York, he had the office furniture sent over from Milan as well as a huge supply of pasta and his favorite olive oil for the employee kitchen. The porcelain and the cutlery in the New York office were the same as in Milan and Tokyo, and the receptionists all wore the same uniforms. At midday, cleaning people would come through the office to empty ashtrays and trash cans. Everything was always shipshape, one employee told me.
Bertelli’s business methods are at times unconventional. In the early 1990s, for example, he killed the company’s best-selling handbag line because he didn’t want Prada to be associated with just one product. “He’ll cut off business even if it’s profitable at the time when he knows it’s holding back growth,” Leslie Johnsen, Prada’s former director of public relations in New York, said. He can become so involved in design that he has been known to redo an entire handbag collection himself. Publicly, Miuccia welcomes his meddling. “It can be annoying,” she once said, “but when he puts his hands on a product, I have to admit, it becomes better.”
Once Bertelli had steered Prada into a thriving business—from $25 million in 1991 to $750 million in 1997—he started spending money like those nouveau riche clients whom Miuccia so loathes. In the late 1990s, he sank more than $50 million into the construction of Luna Rossa, a sleek gray and red yacht, for the America’s Cup. Bertelli, an avid sailor, reasoned that the high-profile competition would bring a new sort of customer to Prada, as well as promote Prada Sport—now known as Linea Rossa—a line of overdesigned, overpriced athletic clothing launched in 1997. In the late 1990s, the Prada store architect Roberto Baciocchi was hired to turn the Via Bergamo building, which was a former gramophone factory, into the company’s new headquarters and the Fondazione Prada, the couple’s contemporary art foundation. The hall, with its exposed steel beams and bare cement walls, is the setting for Prada’s women’s and men’s ready-to-wear wear shows as well as two art exhibits each year. Artists have included Mariko Mori, Barry McGee, and Carsten Höller. When I was there, New York artist Tom Sachs was setting up a show.
Then, in 2000, things began to go bad for Bertelli. Luna Rossa made the America’s Cup finals only to be soundly beaten by New Zealand. Jil Sander up and quit as CEO and designer of the company she had founded thirty years earlier. “Quite simply, Bertelli and I had different visions about how to run the company,” Sander told me later. Without Sander at the design helm, the company foundered and the brand quickly became worthless. And Prada’s nonstop expansion—including the construction of a $40 million Rem Koolhaas–designed epicenter store in downtown Manhattan due to open in late 2001—was sinking the company further into debt. To raise capital, Bertelli decided to take the company public in late September 2001. When the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington happened, the Prada initial public offering was called off, and the luxury market deflated, literally overnight. By the end of 2001, Prada Group reportedly had debts of about $1.9 billion, approximately what it did in sales.
It was discussing the IPO that Miuccia Prada took me truly by surprise. I told her I had read in the morning papers that, now that the company had shed the Jil Sander and Helmut Lang brands, it was rumored in the business world that Prada might attempt an IPO again. No, she said, it wasn’t true. I asked, “How many times have you attempted it? Three, right?” No, she said, once. On September 18, 2001. The other times, she continued, were invented by the press.
I stopped writing in my notebook and looked straight at her. I had heard that the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers had prepared dossiers for two separate attempts since the first one in 2001 and, in 2002, Bertelli had held a press conference to announce one of them.
In her reluctance to be forthcoming, Prada had unwittingly exposed the Achilles heel of luxury today: in becoming leaders of global corporations, luxury executives must now conceal from the public not only how their products are made but how the individual brands are doing. The truth, if widely known, could shatter consumer confidence in the brands: they’d stop buying, profits would plummet, and the companies—and their parent groups—could face bankruptcy. Publicly traded companies are required to be transparent—that is, they must publish their financial data in their annual reports. But when luxury brands are consolidated into groups, they can lump all their figures together to disguise what’s really happening. Overall, LVMH is raking in profits and its brands, thanks to the hype, seem highly successful. What you don’t know is that, as Vuitton is doing record sales each year, the Givenchy and Kenzo fashion houses are muddling along.
In the last decade, more groups have formed, including the Bulgari Group, the Ferragamo Group, and the Valentino Fashion Group, and those that existed previously have added substantially to their portfolios. Today, there are very few European luxury brands that remain independent and privately held. Among them are Sonia Rykiel in France and Giorgio Armani, Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana in Italy, though Versace has talked about going public since before its founder, Gianni Versace, was murdered in 1997. Giorgio Armani, now in his seventies and with no apparent heirs, has over the years contemplated various options, including selling to LVMH and going public. Yet he resists.
I once asked him why. “I can allow myself to go back to the office at night, to change whatever I want without having to justify it to anyone, and without any anxiety about achieving certain financial results because investors—who understand nothing—decide that today its ten of something, then twenty then thirty. That’s the problem,” he said. “Sometimes results take a while, and most of the time, the market requires that the results be felt immediately. Psychologically, this isn’t good for our work, because it puts a damper on our enthusiasm.”
CHAPTER THREE
GOING GLOBAL
���He is poor who does not feel content.”
—JAPANESE PROVERB
KYOICHI TSUZUKI, a Japanese photojournalist and publisher, has spent nearly a decade taking pictures of luxury-brand-obsessed Japanese in their tiny apartments surrounded by their collections of clothes, ties, scarves, jewelry, handbags, and shoes for the Fashion News, one of Japan’s oldest fashion magazines. Tsuzuki calls his subjects “happy victims” because, while they are victims of brand marketing, the items seem to bring them a sort of happiness. On a cool November morning in 2005, I visited Tsuzuki in his apartment in Tokyo and, over cups of jasmine tea, he told me about these happy victims. There is the Hermès collector, a patent executive who lives in a tiny fourth-floor walk-up flat. He keeps all of his Hermès shirts, ties, and leather goods in their original boxes and bags, which are stacked up on h
is tatami floor. He spent half a million yen (about $4,000) on an Hermès briefcase that he carries with an Hermès towel wrapped around the handle to avoid damaging the leather with his hand perspiration.
There is a Buddhist monk who collects Comme des Garçons religiously. Once a month, Tsuzuki told me, the monk sheds his robes, dons Comme des Garçons’ avant-garde constructionist clothes, and heads from his temple to Tokyo to pick up a few more pieces. He is so convinced of their miraculous powers that he says his delinquent sister cleaned up her act when she started wearing Comme des Garçons. There’s an English teacher at a prep school who started wearing Gianni Versace’s flamboyant designs to keep the attention of his students. After ten years, he had one hundred pieces of Versace as well as an impressive Bulgari jewelry collection. He lives in a shoebox apartment with his unemployed girlfriend, who spends her days organizing the collection. There’s a Tom Ford collector (she has both Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent), an Armani man, a McQueen girl, and a Martin Margiela manic who is so fastidious about his collection that he never cooks at home because he doesn’t want the clothes to retain the odors. The only thing in his refrigerator is eyedrops. “When he gets thirsty,” Tsuzuki said, “he goes to a convenience shop and drinks there then goes back home. He does not want to put any kind of trash in the room.”