The Curator Wears Prada
The Met honors fashion’s subversive feminist.
It’s
mid-March, about two weeks since fashion designer Miuccia Prada
finished the marathon of women’s fall shows. She has just returned to
Milan after a vacation in the mountains, and it’s her first day back to
work. Dressed in a roomy, gray V-neck sweater, a white shirt with a
bejeweled collar and a pair of slim-fitting trousers in an oxblood
geometric print, she occasionally fiddles with the gray beret tilted at a
droll angle atop her fine brown hair.
Prada
takes our meeting in her austere office. The white-walled room is on
the third floor of a campus of unattractive structures constructed
during a particularly uninspired period of Italian architecture. As
offices go—especially among designers, whose headquarters tend to be a
grand homage to the brand—Prada’s is spare to the point of looking
unfinished. The only hint of the company’s success—it raised more than
$2 billion last year in an initial public offering in Hong Kong—is a
three-story metal slide by the artist Carsten Holler. It swirls to the
ground from a hole cut in her office floor. It’s the perfect metaphor
for Prada’s desire to escape the constraints of fashion, tradition, and
expectations.
This
spring, Prada will become the latest designer to be honored at the
Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in a
retrospective that pairs her with the great iconoclast Elsa
Schiaparelli, who died in 1973. Prada’s response to “Schiaparelli and
Prada: Impossible Conversations” has been mixed, in part because the two
women are quite different in personality and sensibility. “On one side,
I’m very happy. On the other, it’s very scary because it’s someone
else’s interpretation,” Prada says. “But I decided that of course I’m
super happy.”
The
through line is subversiveness: both designers upended the traditional
definition of female beauty for a generation of women. In the case of
Prada, her lasting legacy will surely be that she made “ugly” chic.
In
the early 1980s, Prada turned industrial black nylon into a symbol of
luxury. She lured status seekers into spending stratospheric sums on
humble backpacks bearing the triangular Prada insignia. With the launch
of women’s ready-to-wear in 1988, she coerced the public into casting an
admiring gaze on hues of puce, pea-soup green, safety orange, and a
shade of brown best described as swamp water. She made wallpaper prints,
doily lace, and teddy-bear fur sophisticated and smart. And she sent
models on a runway power march wearing clothes inspired by blue-collar
uniforms and carrying frame handbags that spoke of grandmothers and
linen hankies.
“I
didn’t want to be restricted to the rules [of high fashion]. I was
looking at the colors and homes and other places and elements that were
not part of the elitist world of my clients,” Prada says. “I also
struggled instinctively against the cliché of a beautiful, rich woman.”
She adds: “I have nothing against a beautiful, rich woman—just the
cliché of it.”
Prada’s
work reflects her own struggle with fashion, an ambivalence that many
women share—particularly those in positions of power. Her style
expresses a high-minded disdain for society’s restrictions and a
repudiation of idealized beauty. “Those were the two topics that I
realized I was always working on,” Prada says. “I realized my job is to
define—well not to define because that’s so pretentious—but to
understand: What does it mean? Beauty, today, for a woman?”
It
is this knowing dismissal of the rules that marks Prada’s work as the
height of chic and cool. Her clothes have influenced American brands
such as Derek Lam and Proenza Schouler. They’ve spawned mass-market
knockoffs and attracted celebrities from Uma Thurman to Zooey Deschanel.
Even “the Devil” has worn Prada.
“Miuccia
is one of the most interesting designers working today,” says designer
and friend Donatella Versace. “She has been able to create an
unmistakable aesthetic that the whole world associates with her brand
while staying always forward and always current. It is one of the most
difficult and complicated tasks for a designer.”
Prada
is the type of woman who wears an evening gown with slippers or her
husband’s T-shirt, workmanlike trousers and a mink. Her jewels are real.
She will sit on the floor with her legs curled underneath her at a
dinner party like an innocent young girl—but at 62, with strong
features, she is neither particularly young nor girlish. She is
political, but her clothes are not politically correct.
“If you know her as a friend, she has a great sense of humor. She loves to laugh,” says Franca Sozzani, editor of Vogue Italia. “It’s completely wrong to think she’s serious and only concentrated on work.”
Prada
is married to company CEO Patrizio Bertelli, and they have two adult
sons. Her staff calls her “Mrs. Prada,” a respectful but old-fashioned
courtesy that would seem inappropriate for a woman whose work exudes
independence and rebelliousness. But then Prada is a dissertation’s
worth of contradictions. Born into a genteel Milanese family, as a young
woman she studied politics and theater. In her 20s, she was a feminist
dressed in Yves Saint Laurent and protesting for the rights of the
proletariat. When she was called into the family business, founded in
1913 by her grandfather Mario Prada, she was not happy. The company sold
suitcases and leather goods to Italian nobility. From its glass-front
boutique trimmed in gilded curlicues in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele
II, it was a purveyor of bourgeois comfort.
“I
hated it,” she says. “I was a feminist in the ’60s and can you imagine?
The worst I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most
uncomfortable position ... And I had problems for so many years; only
recently I stopped.”
“I
realized that so many clever people respect fashion so much and through
my job ... I have an open door to any kind of field,” she says. “It’s a
way of investigating all the different universes: architecture, art,
film.”
“I also realized people respect me because I’m good in my job.”
Most
designers can reminisce about sketching and making paper dolls and prom
dresses when they were young. Some designers, particularly male ones,
pride themselves on tapping into a woman’s emotional connection to
clothes. Not Prada.
She
isn’t a technician in the tradition of Cristobal Balenciaga. She is not
one to stand before a mannequin allowing the sensuality of the fabric
to guide her hand. “She’s not a classic designer in any sense,” says
Lawrence Steele, who worked for Prada in the ’90s and now designs for
the Italian sportswear brand Aspesi. “She doesn’t use a pair of scissors
or a pencil. She talks. It’s nothing that has to do with the technical
aspects of going to school and thinking about how fabric falls. She has
ideas. She vocalizes an opinion.”
In
her workroom, recalls Steele, she might say something like “a princess
who lives in a cave.” The phrase suggests opulence and nobility, but
also something rough and raw. “Suddenly you have a picture in your head.
You’re almost immediately in a novel or a film,” Steele says. “The
thing is, in a week, she might be on to something else, a different
reference. But you’re working that into the collection.”
At
the moment, Prada is fascinated by antiquity, Renaissance painting, the
art-filled Villa Borghese in Rome, and the relationship between
physical and spiritual beauty. She wonders if beauty is some kind of
moral imperative and the desire for it, part of the human condition.
Yet
despite her ever-shifting interests, each collection retains the
essence of Prada. She designs for herself, both physically and
intellectually. She has a familiar body type: slender legs and a womanly
torso. It’s one that doesn’t look good in a clingy gown, so that
silhouette is not part of her vocabulary. But sometimes her designs are
so connected to her interior world that they ignore the physical.
“I
do clothes in theory. I tend not to try the things on the models. Deep
down, I’m not interested if they look good on the body or not. Not even
myself,” she says.
This
approach helps to explain the often-startling reality of her runway
clothes. The richly textured sweaters can be scratchy. The shapely
skirts can be stiff and unyielding. (A kinder fabric is used for the
retail versions.)
“Ugly”
isn’t the intent. It’s the end result of a design philosophy that
treats fashion like other aesthetic pursuits such as art and film. A
painting doesn’t have to elicit joy. A captivating movie can also be
disturbing. “I think probably people confuse fashion with being
beautiful or being sexy or attractive,” Prada says. “Very often people
use it as a [tool], not as pleasure.”
“I
always say sexy dressing is fantastic if it’s a choice ... If you want
to go out naked, I like it. But if you do it because you want to get a
rich husband, no, I hate it.”
Prada
sees herself as having more in common with an artist like Cindy
Sherman, whom she admires, than a fashion fairy godmother giving women
makeovers. Like the photographer, Prada explores the connection between
the many identities a woman puts on publicly and the complicated
personality behind those masks.
When
she selects her models, Prada typically looks at the face, not the
body. She looks for personality and eccentricity, though not always
racial diversity. She has used jolie-laide models like Sasha Pivovarova and shown well-known beauties without the benefit of glamorous makeup or glossy hair.
“The
same model would be in Versace and the press would say, ‘Oh [Gianni
Versace] uses the most beautiful models.’ And me? They were exactly the
same. The same fantastic women are in my show, and they say they’re not
beautiful,” Prada observes. “Of course, I tend to dress them more
modestly.”
Prada’s
work could be defined as avant-garde. But it’s different from the
accomplishments of a designer as outré as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des
Garçons, whose deconstruction of fashion is so complete that a shirt
doesn’t require armholes.
If
one were to list the touchstones of Prada’s work—conservative skirts,
classic sweaters, mannish shirts, clunky heels—one could easily be
describing the wardrobe of the stereotypical Capitol Hill wonk. But
where the policy nerd seems confused by her own femininity and a fashion
failure, Prada succeeds with irony and the confidence born of social
currency.w
Consider
her women’s collection for fall 2012. The trousers are resplendent with
baubles. Her tailored jackets are belted high on the waist. Fuchsia and
tangerine collide in the form of a tunic and trousers. Geometric prints
induce vertigo. The sharp silhouettes suggest authority. The
decorations are exuberant female frippery. The colors and patterns are
wholly rebellious. It’s pure Prada: contradictory, confident, womanly.
After
more than 30 years as a designer, Prada has made peace with her role in
the fashion industry. Accomplished and business savvy, she can easily
talk trends. But Prada steadfastly refuses to answer the more
existential question: “What should I wear?” By her estimation, every
woman already knows.
Robin Givhan is a special correspondent for style and culture for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. In 1995 she became the fashion editor of The Washington Post, where she covered the news, trends, and business of the international fashion industry. She contributed to Runway Madness, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers and Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. She is the author, along with the Washington Post photo staff, of Michelle: Her First Year as First Lady. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism for her fashion coverage. She lives and works in Washington, D.C.
Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/newsweek/2012/04/29/the-curator-wears-prada.html
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