Prada

Prada began as Fratelli Prada in 1913, a Milan leather-goods shop founded by brothers Mario and Martino Prada on Via Manzoni. For seven decades it operated as a quiet, traditional Milanese maker of luggage and accessories. The transformation came in 1978 when Miuccia Prada, Mario's granddaughter, took control of the company and partnered with Patrizio Bertelli (whom she later married); together they reshaped Prada into one of the most intellectually rigorous fashion houses of the 20th and 21st centuries. The 1985 Pocone nylon backpack — black industrial nylon, in a category dominated by status leather — was the first manifesto. Miuccia Prada's vocabulary continued to make a virtue of what others found ugly: the 1996 'ugly chic' collection, the geek-glasses aesthetic, the deliberate use of synthetic and 'wrong' colour palettes. Prada the company expanded to include Miu Miu (founded 1993, named after Miuccia's childhood nickname), the Fondazione Prada (the Milan art foundation that has become a major contemporary art institution), and Church's English shoes. In 2020 Raf Simons joined as co-creative director with Miuccia Prada — an unusual two-designer model that has proven generative. The Prada Group is publicly listed in Hong Kong; in 2025 it announced the acquisition of Versace. Miuccia Prada remains creative director at 76. Few designers have built so much from a position so deliberately at odds with what 'fashionable' was supposed to mean.