Prada

Prada

Mario Prada and his brother Martino opened a leather goods shop called Fratelli Prada in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913, selling imported English trunks and travel accessories to the city's elite. His granddaughter Miuccia Prada took over in 1978 and, working with Patrizio Bertelli, turned a nylon backpack into the idea that a utilitarian material could sit at the center of a luxury house.

Shoes

Prada added its first women's footwear collection in 1979, not long after Miuccia Prada started shaping the house's direction, and shoes have stayed a core category ever since. The house treats a shoe the way it treats a bag, as an engineering problem first, decoration second.

More Shoes

A second wall of the same instinct, ranging across heel heights and finishes without losing the slightly severe, intellectual mood the house is known for. Nothing here is trying especially hard to be liked, which is very on brand.

Still more Shoes

More of the same category, proof of how much real estate footwear occupies in the current collection. The range moves between the utilitarian and the more directional, a contrast Miuccia Prada has leaned on since she first started experimenting with industrial nylon in the 1970s.

Tops and shirting

Prada didn't add a full women's ready-to-wear collection until 1988, comparatively late for a house already decades old, and the category still carries that slightly cerebral, considered quality. Shirting here tends toward precise rather than flowy.

More Tops and shirting

A further stretch of the same category, still working the house's ongoing interest in a slightly off, intellectualized take on classic shapes. It rewards a closer look at the cut rather than an obvious print or logo.

Accessories

Accessories sit close to where the modern house actually began, small leather goods and travel items, before nylon and ready-to-wear ever entered the picture. The category still trades on precision finishing more than embellishment.

More Accessories

More of the smaller pieces that round out a full Prada wardrobe, continuing a lineage that runs back to the original 1913 shop's trunks and travel cases. The scale has changed enormously since then, the attention to material has not.

Bags

Bags are arguably the house's founding category, and the current range still shows the tension between traditional leather craft and the harder, more architectural shapes Miuccia Prada introduced once she began pushing the house past its trunk-shop origins.

Skirts

Skirts round out the ready-to-wear side of the house, part of the category that only fully arrived in 1988. They tend to favor structure and a clean line over anything overtly decorative, in keeping with the label's general temperament.

More from the collection

Additional pieces from the current range, still filtered through the same push and pull between austere material choices and a fairly maximalist creative instinct that has defined the house since Miuccia took over in the late 1970s.

More from the collection

Another stretch of the current assortment, spanning categories the house has added over more than a century, from its original leather-goods roots through ready-to-wear, menswear and the Miu Miu-adjacent design sensibility that still shows up occasionally in the main line.

More from the collection

The remainder of what this edit is pulling together, a reminder of just how wide the Prada range has become since a small Milan trunk shop opened over a hundred years ago in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

Our honest take

Very few houses can claim over a century of continuous operation and still feel intellectually restless, but Prada mostly manages it by treating its own history as raw material rather than a script to repeat. Whether that reads as visionary or simply consistent probably depends on how you feel about nylon.