Miuccia Prada entered the family leather goods business in 1978, taking over the house her grandfather Mario had founded in 1913 as a Milanese maker of trunks and handbags. Her apprenticeship was Prada itself, learning the codes of saddle stitching and frame construction before any garment came into the picture.

Prada’s method settled around an industrial fabric, Pocone nylon, cut into the black backpack of 1984 and a run of utilitarian bags that reframed status away from gilt hardware and toward a matte technical weave.

The womenswear line arrived in 1988, run from the Milan headquarters that would later sit inside the Prada Group alongside Miu Miu, Church’s, and Car Shoe. The clothes pulled at postwar Italian bourgeois dress, knee-length skirts in muted geometric prints, slim knits, narrow-shouldered coats, kitten heels, and the nylon accessories that funded the rest.

The fall-winter 1996 collection, with its sour palette of brown, ochre, and acid green, placed her alongside Helmut Lang and Jil Sander in a Northern European minimalism that pushed against the glamour of the period, and the CFDA International Award followed in 1993 and again in 2004. By the late 2010s the group reported revenues above 3 billion euros, with the spring-summer 2019 show and its Frankenstein knits marking one of the decade’s clearer commercial peaks.

Since February 2020, Prada has shared creative direction of the house with Raf Simons, an arrangement announced as a co-equal partnership. Their first men’s collection, fall-winter 2021, returned to the triangle logo on uniform shifts, sleeveless tunics, and slim trousers, filmed in place of a runway during the pandemic. The pairing extends an argument she has made for four decades, that taste in Milan can be tested against another sensibility and hold its shape.