It all starts with an email shrouded in mystery. On the evening of Saturday February 22, 2020, the day before the closing of Milan fashion week, while the entire city panicked and shut down in the face of the progression of Covid-19 in Lombardy, a handful of journalists received a message. An appointment is made the next day at noon at the Prada headquarters, via Bergamo, in the west of the city, to attend a press conference. The style is unadorned, almost telegraphic. Above all, it concludes with the mention of an embargo: it is a question of not talking about it to anyone. “I felt like I was being called to a secret service meeting in the holy of holies. Something big was going to happen. We had to go,” remembers Angelo Flaccavento, columnist for the fashion pages ofIl Sole 24 Ore, daily Italian economic and financial news.
Right on time on Sunday, only a few Italian journalists and the special correspondents of the most serious international titles in the profession, including Women’s Wear Daily, The Business of Fashion, Le Monde Or Le Figaro, therefore find themselves in a conference room (without windows) of this imposing building resembling a boarding school where Prada took up residence more than twenty years ago. While a buffet offers toast buttered with anchovies, a specialty of Milanese bourgeois cuisine, the small coterie of signatures have fun coming up with the most eccentric scenarios. We imagine in a jumble: the sale of the house to the French giant LVMH, the retirement of Miuccia Prada herself, the arrival of a new designer at the head of the collections…
Another hypothesis is circulating, which is confirmed by the start of the press conference: on the small platform dominating the audience, in front of a striated painting by the American minimalist painter Frank Stella, Miuccia Prada, unwavering chief designer of the brand that bears her name, presents himself in the company of his Flemish colleague Raf Simons, who we had no longer seen too much in the light after his departure from Calvin Klein, in 2018. These two are preparing to form a duo at the head of the studio of the Lombard label. Creative work, hand in hand, which is nothing less than a small revolution. “We would never have imagined that Miuccia Prada would one day deign to share her throne! “, specifies Angelo Flaccavento.
The questions begin. What about Miu Miu, the group’s “other” house? Miuccia Prada, whose nickname serves as the name of the brand, will keep sole control. When will their collaboration begin? September 2020. Above all, how will this hitch work? They remain vague. The journalists leave the room. Raf Simons, Miuccia Prada and her Praetorian Guard have already left. It is impossible to know more about how a house forcefully embodied for decades by its creator will be reorganized.
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