Miuccia Prada: The Communist Who Reinvented Luxury

Miuccia Prada: The Communist Who Reinvented Luxury

Miuccia Prada was never supposed to become the face of Italian luxury.

Born in Milan in 1949, she was the granddaughter of Mario Prada, the founder of the family business that began in 1913 as a purveyor of luxury luggage, leather goods and travel accessories. Prada had the kind of heritage that came with polished leather, discreet customers and old Milanese privilege. It was a world of craftsmanship and tradition.

Miuccia, however, spent much of her early life moving in the opposite direction.

She studied political science. She became involved with the Italian Communist Party. She campaigned for women's rights. She trained for five years in mime and theatre at Milan's Piccolo Teatro. Fashion, by her own later accounts, was almost the last thing she imagined doing with her life.

Then, in the late 1970s, she stepped into the family company.

What happened next changed not only Prada, but the meaning of luxury itself.

Miuccia Prada's great achievement was not simply that she transformed an old leather-goods company into a global fashion house. It was that she made contradiction fashionable. She put industrial nylon beside fine leather. She made intellectual awkwardness desirable. She challenged the idea that luxury had to look expensive.

And, perhaps most importantly, she built one of fashion's most powerful brands while remaining deeply suspicious of the very concept of luxury she was selling.

Early Life: Politics, Theatre and the Prada Family

Miuccia Prada grew up surrounded by a family business, but she did not immediately embrace it.

Her grandfather Mario Prada founded the original Prada store in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913. The business became associated with high-quality travel goods, handbags, trunks and accessories, serving an affluent clientele.

The family name therefore carried weight long before Miuccia ever appeared on a fashion runway.