Prada is a handbag, a fashion brand, a symbol of luxury, and becomes a cultural body that reshapes the perception of the audienceItalian fashion critic Angelo Flacc**Ento recently wrote in a designer interview for W magazine: "It's not easy to capture the Prada brand, the world it represents is like a puzzling puzzle, and the process of probing into it is like deciphering the mind, and it is dizzying." And the more bewildering, the more fascinating. That's right. If flacc**ento sees my ambitious title, I'm afraid I'll roll my eyes. It's too presumptuous, for a brand like this, which is committed to building a fluid and complex context, there are about 100 Prada in the hearts of a hundred people. Even Ms. Prada herself would not be happy to confine it to words and words. To be precise, it is not so much how to understand Prada, but how to understand a luxury brand that has become an intellectual label and **. How to make sense of this enduring Prada frenzy. This frenzy has once again converged, diffused, and spread with the recent opening of the Pradasphere II exhibition at the Star Art Museum in Shanghai, reaching every Prada star with a palpable heat in the cold season, and pulling every observer who stops outside the planet. Two weeks ago, I felt the energy of this frenzy as I walked through the scaffold-style display stand with the first batch of invited fashion editors and fashion professionals, perusing hundreds of past collections carefully selected from a vast archive.
The Pradasphere II exhibition opened at the Shanghai Star Art Museum.This Prada chronicle, without any stimulus or textual rendering, even the depiction of the series is flat and straightforward, but it almost immediately arouses nostalgia in everyone. Even former fashion editors who have left the magazine industry can't help but reminisce about themselves: "Look, I remember this collection, I started this season. ”This is the highest compliment. Firmly embedded in the memory, it is not only the unique fabric or color of a certain collection, but also the initial love and ideal of fashion, even if it is silently cooled down in the trivial and tortuous life in the future, it will be easily triggered at certain moments. There aren't many brands and events that trigger such moments, especially when a world-renowned luxury brand like Prada is able to engage emotions rather than just a sense of admiration for business scale, spectacle and sales figuresWhat is it about such a non-niche brand that arouses religious cult fanaticism?Miuccia Prada then appeared at the exhibition with her co-creative director, Raf Simons, and was quickly surrounded by a crowd. The fashion person, who has always been cold and reserved, showed a passion for chasing stars at this time.
Prada Co-Creative Directors Raf Simons and Miuccia PradaI struggled to capture Miuccia Prada in the gaps between the layers of swaying back of my head. She is not tall, thin, and has a calm posture, but it is impossible to ignore. This is the founder, creator, and leader of one of the most recognizable brands in the world. It is she who makes a multinational company like Prada behave more like an independent and avant-garde brand. Where did the Prada frenzy come from?The answer lies in her. Although he took over the family business founded by his grandfather in 1913. But Prada has become equal to Miuccia Prada herself. With her time at the helm of Prada, Miuccia Prada has embedded her personal identity and DNA into the brand. Her productions are complex, contradictory, vivid, rigorous and lively, elite and inclusive, traditional and avant-garde, popular and rebellious, solid and fluid, as Flacc**Ento puts it, "a puzzling puzzle". But there is no doubt that it is intellectual. Ms. Prada's youth was a sample of the life of Western women intellectuals of that era. She has a PhD in political science and loves Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini's films. Born into a wealthy bourgeois family, he was inspired by social trends.
The 20-year-old is "ashamed" of her involvement in politics and the desire to change the world, as she often said in future interviews. 
With her time at the helm of Prada, Miuccia Prada has embedded her personal identity and DNA into the brand.In 1978, at the age of 30, she "reluctantly" took over Prada. Her tangled and ambiguous attitude towards fashion didn't stop her from launching a phenomenal handbag that established her position in the industry six years later. Instead of high-quality leather, it is made of nylon cloth, which is usually used to make parachutes and never enters the category of luxury materials. Miuccia Prada says it's out of her own exposure to any bourgeois subject"I want to destroy it. ”This early work is more or less a clear expression of the core of Prada's ethos, which runs through the next 40 years of creation: the reflective quality. Her collections are always filled with self-awareness and self-reflection, urging the audience to rethink the expression of fashion and its inclusive areas. Today, 40 years later, the bag has been iterated and is still in fashion. The destruction continues,This also makes Prada move away from a handbag, a fashion brand, and a luxury symbol, and become a cultural body that reshapes the perception of the audience。At the age of 40, Miuccia Prada decided to design**. A year before the launch of the collection, Ms. Prada married Patrizio Bertelli, CEO of her business and life companion company. Although I can't find **, judging from the existing textual materials, she wore a bit of a sword at the wedding, a gray cotton dress and a **coat made by Ferrari Sisters, a top children's clothing brand in Milan. There is no doubt that she faithfully incorporates her unique taste into this collection. Since then, Ms. Prada has only worn clothes designed by herself. The Prada brand and Miuccia Prada herself have since officially become one in multiple dimensions. At the Pradasphere II exhibition, we can see the collection from the Fall/Winter 1988 collection. This collection opens up the Prada 90s, which at first glance looks minimalist, but when you look closely, it looks quirky. Cardigans, knee-length skirts, bucket hats, simple buttons for school uniforms, the usual outfit has survived to this day, and earthy brown, which Miuccia Prada says is the least popular and hardest to sell, but it prefers to be used in large quantities, and has since become Prada's signature color.
Prada Fall/Winter 1988.This collection is in line with some bourgeois tastes, simple, luxurious, elegant A-line skirts and elaborate black coats, which destroy some bourgeois tastes, such as frivolous hot pink and bright red, colors that Ms. Prada herself has long wanted to wear since childhood, but which was strictly forbidden by her mother, who held a traditional style. Another example is shoes, flat-soled ** shoes, women can step on it and run. As with the first bag, the first collection already hints at some of the ideas that will come from Prada's creations. Pradaism is rich and complex, multi-layered, but never broken and regressed. It is the beginning of Miuccia Prada's own autobiographical design, showing how a Prada woman, who grew up surrounded by the best and most elegant tastes, explores and fights against this tradition that has invaded her bloodline. Her designs are always about the misalignment of impressions and concepts, a battle against the aesthetic that we take for granted. From then on, other designers would follow her path, and her adored status began to be established, and she gradually became a cultural hero. In an essay on Godard, Susan Sontag writes that modern cultural heroes have two things in common: they are in some respects exemplars of hard work and great destroyers of the old. This has led them to two very different attitudes towards culture. Artists like Duchamp had to make an indifferent satirical gesture towards traditional high art. Godard, on the other hand, showed a great appetite for acceptance of all cultural achievements, and although there was no lack of reflection, he did not shy away from elegance and inclusiveness, and developed his own path by absorbing the artistic achievements of others. Miuccia Prada undoubtedly falls into the latter category. Unlike other avant-garde independent designers of the '90s, who revolutionized high fashion, Prada's designs can be described as radical conservatism. She doesn't abandon traditional beauty, but reinvents it, and the inspiration board seems to have no boundaries. She would interpret femininity and the complex relationship between feminism and fashion with the most stereotyped, clichéd lace and chiffon, and also pay homage to Yves Saint Laurent, who best embodied bourgeois good taste (and the designer she admires the most). She refers to the works of French futurist fashion masters such as Paco Rabanne, André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin, the dress of the French bourgeoisie, and also draws on Italian neorealist films and black ***, especially after the millennium, she has moved from simplicity to complexity, and the collection is ever-changing, full of all kinds of whimsy and inspiration. These series are fragments and echo each other. It can be said that each series is a self-denying whole, a whole that deconstructs the whole. Even, a self-denying whole is formed between the collections, a Prada deconstruction of the Prada whole. She says that she does ugly designs on purpose, and her spirit of reflection and questioning points not only at traditional beauty, but also at herself. For example, she scoffed at the obvious sexual provocation in the designs of other Italian brands such as Gucci, which was helmed by Tom Ford, and responded with old-fashioned prints known as "ugly fashion" in the spring/summer of 1996. But in the autumn of 2002, she rejected her previous deliberately serious and old-fashioned retro style, and launched a series called""Erotic Fashion", a collection with a transparent PVC jacket and knee-high black leather boots.
prada Spring/Summer 1996 and Fall/Winter 2002Miuccia Prada says:"Fashion is never about making clothes, it's about living different sides of your personality. ”In 2020, when Raf Simons became co-creative director of the brand, Prada once again underwent some subtle changes. The collection at the beginning seemed to be more concise and restrained, adding street elements that Simons excelled at. However, after a few seasons of running-in, the combination of Prada x Simons gradually developed a fantastic chemistry. Recalling Prada's past designs, they continue to examine and reinvent traditional clothing, with a Simons-esque modernity, but with the same Prada elements and techniques. It's easy to understand why, no matter how eclectic her creative ideas were, she ended up with a clearly recognizable Prada style, and these iconic pieces remained unchanged from the beginning: knee-length skirts, cuts or pleated patternsHeavy leather shoes, often paired with very unique knee-high socks;Pink and peculiar colour combinations such as brown, mustard and purple. Prada's collections are like the Prada lady herself, with a solid base and then layers added over time, with different aspects of her personality unpredictable. It's fun, it's complex, it's fascinating, but it's never blurry. Prada's collections are like the Prada lady herself, with a solid base and then layers added over time, with different aspects of her personality unpredictable. It's fun, it's complex, it's fascinating, but it's never blurry. Prada herself is like that, and so is her collection. Miuccia Prada juxtaposes contradictory elements and expresses them in an elusive way. This exploration of the boundaries between beauty and ugliness has now formed a new yardstick. Nowadays, people have long been accustomed to Prada's creations always having a strange feeling. No matter how quirky the design, her audience will only doubt themselves, not the Prada lady's level of taste. But in the early days, this exploration required courage. The authoritative American fashion review** was shocked by the tan suede aprons, shorts made of shells and miniskirts that appeared in the 1991 Spring/Summer Prada** collection.
prada Spring/Summer 1991 collection"It's outrageous!The reviewer wrote. And what Miuccia Prada fears is not outrageous, but boring. "If you just want to look thin and wear a narrow and ** dress, then you're just going to end up wearing boring clothes and there's no possibility of creating," she said. Fashion isn't just about attracting people. ”Fashion isn't just about attracting people, it's also about the brain. In 1991, fashion editors were already calling Prada's collections "intellectual pieces". A Guardian reporter once wrote: "If you choose to wear a Prada, you're not thinking about clothes, you're thinking about something else: Proust, the meaning of life, or what granite in 2001: A Space Odyssey means." This is, of course, a joke, a piece of clothing is impossible to be an "intellectual". In 1993, Ms. Prada expanded her world to Fondazione Prada, where she co-chaired it with her husband. Since then, Prada has shown its temperament as an "intellectual brand" in a broader and far-reaching dimension. Today, we have long assumed that every large-scale fashion house should be a cultural platform, holding exhibitions, collaborating with artists or industrial designers. It's a regular exercise where the budget and investment are controlled by the leadership, and the creative and marketing departments are responsible for sourcing creators from other fields.
Therefore, the fashion house is not culture itself, it is just a cultural platform that creates an artistic and fashionable lifestyle for the public, with the goal of selling a few more handbags through multiple marketing methods. Miuccia Prada is different. Unlike most luxury brands, she is both a business decision-maker and a creator. In the system of large corporations, it is often seen that the creator stands in a dazzling light to display his soul, assuring the public that his soul has full value, and the businessman behind it is responsible for transforming the display of this soul into a steady stream of turnover. The sincerity of the value of the creator's soul is often questioned. Any decision made by Prada is made by the designer himself, which in itself is much more convincing. Prada has the Miuccia Prada feel in everything she does, and her approach to culture is, as she said in an interview"We don't sponsor culture, we create culture。And she did. From the moment she decided to pursue her career in the field of art, Ms. Prada and her husband began to meet artists and devote themselves to learning. It wasn't until more than 20 years after this self-education that she handed over her work and caused an uproar in the world. In 2015, a permanent physical art institution was inaugurated in Milan, designed by long-time Prada partners Rem Koolhaas and OMA, and opened to the public. It's a place of grandeur to stunning, formerly a winery dating back to the early 20th century, consisting of seven existing buildings and three new ones, including a four-storey gilded tower known as the "Haunted House" and director Wes Anderson-designed café Bar Luce. 
Fondazione Prada was officially inaugurated in Milan in 2015.I still remember the first time I visited Prada**, it was as different as any other Prada production. The haunted house displays works by sculptors Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois. On the top floor, Gober installed a sewer with water flowing underneath. Between the rocks and the rubble, there is a heart with a light on, which is discarded, but still beating. Facing this beating heart, an Italian friend on the side said faintly: "Italy should be ashamed, for so many years they have not been able to build a contemporary art center in Milan, which is full of traditional museums, but Prada is a brand that has done it." As Ms. Prada says, she is not simply a patron. In an interview with Another Magazine, Germano Celent, Prada's Director of Arts and Sciences, mentioned that Ms. Prada is a very professional curator. And, her curatorial style and design style are the same: "When it comes to ideas and solutions for art presentations, Miuccia is definitely one of the most experimental people I've ever met. She is never satisfied with the latest exhibition trends, but always strives to achieve more extreme results. Today, Prada** is a vibrant and vibrant part of Milan's cultural landscape, with a wide range of exhibitions in all forms. In a recent lengthy report published in The New York Times, Miuccia Prada said, "I often tell the staff at the club that I have to sell a lot of expensive handbags to run the museum." Her friend, the British artist Damien Hirst, remembers her saying, "A handbag is not art." And when you meet other people," the artist continued to tell reporters, "they'll keep telling you that handbags are art and you need 100." ”
miuccia pradaShe said she had to sell a lot of expensive handbags to run the museumOne of the things that struck me most in this long New York Times essay on Prada was Wes Anderson's description of Miuccia Prada: "You can quickly feel her vulnerability, and that vulnerability can disappear from someone so authoritative." I don't think you can fully touch them without a little bit of that feeling. "This makes people understand the ** of Prada frenzy even more. No matter how society and the world change, human beings still need idols. In the era when manufacturing and commercial civilization are overwhelming, entrepreneurs hidden under the invincible cold face will make people feel awe and worship in the style of Muqiang, but it is impossible to enter people's hearts. What makes Miuccia Prada a cultural icon and cultural hero is not the Prada company's track record, but her boundless energy, adventurous spirit and unique personality that she still shows when navigating a commercial, consumer and rapidly popularizing the world of fashion. People always want to see strong personal preferences and real emotions to succeed in secular society, which gives rise to hope that people will not be finally erased by numbers and institutions. And it is only when such a founder becomes a cultural hero that a multinational corporation can arouse a religious cult frenzy. It's rare, but it's not the only one, as is the case with Steve Jobs and Elon Mask. This cultural hero is a composite contradiction. Miuccia Prada once told The Independent: "You know, I have to be very brave to do fashion. Theoretically, this is the most feminist job, and in the 60s, I was very young. Italian society began to indulge in consumerism, but my great dream was justice, equality and moral revival. She also said that joining the social movement was the most important thing for the bourgeois youth of Italy at the time, but we have reason to believe that the young Miuccia Prada has grown the foundation that would shape her into the Prada lady she is today, and that she is not just chasing trends. Even when she was first at the helm of the brand, she did not hide her radical and revolutionary side. In 1986, Prada invited photographer Helmut Newton to shoot the brand's first campaign. The model is shown lying on the ground like a dead body, and the gray wool coat is torn to the hips, revealing a lace petticoat. Her handbag was open, and her belongings were scattered all over the floor: passports, international currency, small boxes, and folded newspaper clippings showing the face of the Italian financier Licio Gelli. Miuccia Prada's bold provocation ended with the receipt of a letter from Gelli's lawyer to take down the advertisement. It was an idealistic, passionate, and fearless Prada.
In 1986, Prada invited photographer Helmut Newton to shoot a brand advertisement that caused controversyThirty years later, in 2017, she has become an epoch-making designer, successfully turning Prada into a business empire, changing the way fashion intervenes in culture and art, as well as the way people look at fashion. She became more mature, mellow, and sane. Idealism and the pursuit of politics remain, and this year's Spring/Summer collection, one of the posters plastered on the walls of the Prada set appeared with the phrase: "Fashion is about everyday life, and everyday life is the political arena of our freedom." She transforms her love-hate relationship with fashion into an action to change the connotation of fashion, and finds her own value and meaning in it. When it came time to sell more handbags with a simple and straightforward message, she didn't give up on the pursuit of sophistication. It's not a compromise, it's a coordination and a build. Why do intellectuals and some of the world's most brilliant people love Prada?I think it is precisely because of the coordination and construction that Ms. Prada herself has shown that it is a collective pursuit. Revolutionaries and the establishment were once seen as two distinct paths, as I have quoted Alain Badiou several times: "Basically, when you are young, you usually don't figure it out that you are faced with two directions in life, which sometimes overlap and sometimes contradict each other. I can summarize these two directions as follows: either burn your life with passion, or build your life with passion. Burning life is a nihilistic cult and a pure rebellion, an uprising, disobedience, rebellion, a yearning for a new world, a life that requires a brief form of collective life, such as the occupation of a public square for a period of time. But as we have seen, this kind of life does not last long, without construction, without any form of organized control of time. You march from the slogan 'There is no future'. If, on the contrary, you allow yourself to commit yourself to the future, to succeed, to earn money, to gain social status, to occupy a high-paying position, to have a peaceful and quiet family life, and to often go on holiday to the southern islands, all this leads to a conservative cult of the existing power structure, because you are in order to organize your life in the most likely way. And just as she erased the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, Ms. Prada erased the boundaries between those two paths. She rebelled and then devoted herself to the future, where she was successful, earning money, gaining social status, and having a peaceful and quiet family life. But none of this has numbed her to compromise and a conservative cult of the existing power structure. If you can't destroy the land, you can at least change the direction of the wind blowing above and improve the soil. Ms. Prada offers an elitist and idealistic the best way to survive in a world where elitism and idealism have gone bankrupt. The work she does is all about reconciling the noble with the vulgar, the art with the business, the feminism with the objectification, the serious sociology of fashion with the increasingly superficial cult of influencers, and the realities of idealism and consumer society. She went from being a young revolutionary to a full-fledged establishment. In the face of a chaotic world, she accepted and embraced all kinds of complexities, contradictions and ambiguities, showed firm determination and perseverance, and also made extraordinary efforts. In the soil she cultivates, the leading architects who have been commissioned by Prada to design retail, art exhibition and fashion show spaces, such as Rem Koolhaas, Ole Scheeren and Herzog & de Meuron, can unleash their talents to create more than just beautiful modern buildings. Despite the fact that the Prada Group has been heavily indebted and has failed several IPO plans, Ms. Prada shows us that success is not measured by how much money is made. Now, Raf Simons, who has been frustrated by other big brands, has finally found a comfortable place in this soil, and Prada's revenue jumped 21% last year compared to 2021. She shows that it is possible to choose a posture that neither escapes, nor self-exile, nor attachment, nor lowers. This is a love letter from me, who is also elitist and idealistic, to Prada. Hopefully, while it may not be able to tell the whole story of Prada, it will at least provide a logical entry point to understand Prada. Hopefully, we'll be able to appreciate serious intellectuals wearing plain Prada shirts, but we can also show off their Prada triangles and the most recognizable Prada new products in front of the hipsters. I hope that we will accept and embrace this complex world of strange deformations like a mirror, just like the creators of Prada. I hope that while we love Prada, we can also break free from the self-definition of clothing and fashion, and find satisfaction and happiness in a truly intellectual life. * The column article only represents the author's personal views, welcome to leave a message to discuss**