The Devil Instagrams Prada

As Miuccia Prada made final adjustments to her most recent runway show during Milan Fashion Week last month, her husband and co-chief executive officer, Patrizio Bertelli, famously hands-on in so many aspects of the business, stayed away. “Even if you know all the ingredients, a good cocktail should be mixed by the person who’s actually in charge,” he said from the calm of the company’s headquarters, whose strict minimalist renovations gave it the white walls and polished concrete floors of an art gallery. There’s even a 100-foot spiral slide by German artist Carsten Höller shooting out into the courtyard.

Across town, Prada and their 30-year-old son, Lorenzo, who joined Prada SpA last year to help run social media, were anything but calm, rushing around the family’s contemporary art foundation, Fondazione Prada, where the show would introduce the 2019 spring-summer line. Guests would soon start arriving, wearing $2,550 Prada banana-print dresses and $1,850 oversize hot-pink Prada foam vests. As the show began, Sofia Coppola sat next to Spike Lee, who wore orange socks that matched his round orange spectacles. (Lee would later inaugurate the Fondazione’s film season.) To the thump of a techno soundtrack, the models strutted out wearing thick studded hair bands, satin A-line skirts, tie-dye prints, and plunging necklines. The next day fashion critics described the collection as a subversive commentary on bourgeois fashion. The collection “put Prada back at fashion’s pinnacle,” declared Vogue’s Suzy Menkes, the doyenne of fashion criticism.