Mrs. Prada

Almost everyone refers to Miuccia Prada in the most formal of ways, but she herself has never been one to stand on ceremony. Wendell Stevenson meets a designer who has built an empire in her own image: iconic, iconoclastic and enormously influential.

- Stef Mitchell.

IT WAS NOVEMBER AND A little windy on the balcony of the Ca’ Corner della Regina, the 18th-century palazzo that is home to the Prada Foundation in Venice, where Miuccia Prada was posing for photographs against the backdrop of the Grand Canal. She clasped a red silk coat (from her very first collection in 1988) over a citrine sweater, bright and sharp against the gray sky and the terra-cotta, ochre, and verdigris of deliquescent Venice. She wore no discernible makeup; her long blond and auburn hair was unstyled and hung in soft curls at her shoulders. When it fanned in the breeze, she joked about looking very 1990s, like Cindy Crawford in a wind machine.

Afterward, several of us gathered around a table for lunch. Mrs. Prada, as she is deferentially known, took off the two grand gold necklaces (one of lions’ heads) and the other medallions she was wearing and laid them on an adjacent chair, as if relinquishing the heavy chains of office, and began, Italian-mama style, to spoon rice onto our plates. The lunch was simple: chicken patties, braised endive, spinach, and salad. The vegetables, she said, came from her garden in Tuscany—oh, yes, she nodded, she takes a close interest in the planting. There is not much, I would come to understand, that Prada does not take a close interest in.