According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a sphere is a solid figure that is completely round, with every point on its surface an equal distance from the center. Pradasphere in Milan perfectly fits that definition, since everything in the exhibition revolves around Miuccia Prada and her family’s history — and it’s fascinating.
The designer’s grandfather Mario and his brother Martino opened their luggage and luxury objects store under the Fratelli Prada banner 113 years ago in Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. It has since been expanded to cover eight floors of retail, the famed Marchesi patisserie, and art, including Pradasphere. Prada Galleria now includes a new subterranean passage under the landmarked 19th-century shopping arcade that connects the women’s store with the men’s one, linking two sides of the central octagon.
“When I started considering how to approach the Galleria project, the site where Prada was founded in 1913 and our story from then until now, I thought about the different exchanges that have shaped our work over the years — trying to make this complexity more visible and intelligible,” says Miuccia Prada. “Art, architecture, film, culture and sports are not separate fields that Prada gradually accumulated, but rather part of an ongoing dialogue with the world around us, driven by a desire to understand it better.”
Pointing to continuous exploration, the designer says that “it is through this connection with other disciplines that Prada has evolved: the architects, artists and filmmakers we have collaborated with have always been creative partners, people with whom we share and develop ideas. Prada would not be the same without these exchanges. It is the sum of different perspectives, rather than any one of them alone, that defines who we are.”
Pradasphere, the first permanent exhibition dedicated to Prada after earlier traveling iterations in 2014 in London and Hong Kong, and in 2023 in Shanghai, definitely reflects this cross-pollination of influences.
However, “this is the first time we go back to the origins of the brand,” says Prada Group chief executive officer Andrea Guerra during a walk-through, pointing to a 1918 commission from the Italian Queen’s Wardrobe ordering a new trunk and a copy of an existing model, the earliest record of a royal order. In 1922 the King of Italy granted Fratelli Prada the right to incorporate the royal Savoy coat of arms and knotted-rope motif into their official emblem.
Organized in three episodes — Origins, Evolution and Perspectives — the first area is punctuated by the reproductions of the vitrines that Mario Prada, aiming for excellence, had purchased directly from E. Pollard & Co. in London for the Galleria store. He commissioned two murals of steamships from Nicola Benois, a set designer and painter at the Teatro alla Scala, which are protected cultural artworks and thus can never be removed and which allow Prada to secure the first store’s space indefinitely.
Mario Prada sourced fine leathers, silver, silk and crystal from Europe and beyond and these are on public display in Milan for the first time. Tracing the history and culture of Prada from its foundation and first shop in 1913, first in are steamship trunks and elegant leather cases with travel kits and impeccably crafted personal toiletries, such as natural-bristle brushes in engraved silver or grooming tools in wood, glass and silver, all displayed in mahogany and glass cabinets that are meant to replicate those in the brand’s first store.
Nearby, the 1913 Satiro bag, a pleated marbled silk evening bag adorned with ruches and decorative folds with the hand-carved clasp featuring a small satyr with his tongue out, telegraphs the innovative and nonconformist streak running through the family across generations to today. In fact, the bag has been reproduced and is available for purchase.
All of these came from the family’s own archives, a treasure trove that shows the focus on craftsmanship that is almost genetic to the Prada clan. As Guerra admits, “Working with the founders, it’s fascinating that they move through these things as if it were absolutely normal, while we were all astonished, seeing them for the first time. I had seen some bags. I had seen some small beauty boxes, but these are family memories for them, they are part of their soul.”
For this reason, Guerra believes that the decisions made for the brand are “instinctive.” Looking at the details of the first objects on display, “you see the same kind of logic, attitude and behavior more than a century later.”
Mulling over the role of an archive, Guerra says “you can’t walk away from your DNA, but here there is no nostalgia, all of this is roots for the future, and if you have long roots, the tree will be stronger and higher and taller. To me this is not lifestyle, it’s culture.”
To wit, the opening of Pradasphere in Milan at this moment is no accident, given the general uncertain scenario and challenges. “I think it’s very, very important to be able to tell the world that you’re not just a logo or a label, but what we think about the world, about this industry. Where do we come from? Who are we? This allows people that are not in the industry to understand what is behind, what are the roots, what is the soul, and to the Prada lovers to spend entire days in these rooms, thinking and dreaming about what they have bought and what they could buy and what they can be engaged upon. This is connection,” muses Guerra.
The Evolution segment of Pradasphere reflects Miuccia Prada’s attitude, pushing conventions with unexpected choices, such as the introduction of Pocono nylon in 1976 in a camera bag, using a material her grandfather had applied as protective covering for steamer trunks.
The nylon backpack from 1984, also on display, is still in stores today, remarks Guerra. In fact, while surely revolutionary, continuity and longevity are also applicable to Prada. Cue a leather ballerina shoe from 1990, which was revisited and has been “the most popular flat in the last two years,” says Guerra.
Likewise for the buildings of the Epicenter stores in New York by Rem Koolhaas and OMA and in Tokyo by Herzog & de Meuron with a diamond-grid glass shell, whose models are on display, and have become “part of city guides today,” says Guerra proudly. The futuristic blueprints contrast with the stately and storied Galleria building, which is peppered with marble fireplaces and frescoed ceilings, juxtapositions aligned with Prada’s multifaceted universe — from sports, with the Luna Rossa sailing boat, to art and Fondazione Prada.
But Prada is most of all about fashion, and again the styles on display show how groundbreaking Miuccia Prada’s designs have been through the decades. Highlights range from the first look of the first Prada show in 1988, a dark understated coat, or the Flame Heels sandal from the spring 2012 collection, a cutout flame trailing from the back like a tailpipe and a bow on the peep-toe front, to the 1995 structured Carolyn bag in brushed leather carried most famously by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.
In a room dedicated to Miuccia Prada’s favorite garment and floating from the ceiling is a series of skirts presented first in 2023 for Pradasphere II in Shanghai with works by Kayoko Ota of AMO for the “Waist Down” traveling exhibition — and it’s a delight. The display also shows how the designer revisits themes again and again since her and Raf Simons’ spring 2027 collection is, again, all about the skirt.
But Prada is far from dwelling on its past. In the Perspectives area, together with a selection of archival men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, there is the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit suit for NASA’s return to the lunar surface, developed by Axiom Space, with Prada contributing materials and manufacturing techniques for the outer layer — yet another sign of the modernity of the brand.
The museum portion ends in a velvet-padded room with snorkel-like long tubular screens that were first installed at the Prada Epicenter Aoyama in Tokyo, letting shoppers browse the collections directly from the shop floor, and a small cinema, a reminder of Prada’s decades-long collaborations with top film directors, ranging from Jordan and Ridley Scott in 2005 for a fragrance film, to Nicolas Winding Refn and Wes Anderson.
“We had some unbelievable partnerships, and you can see downstairs some of the products that were used in some of the movies. So again, it’s a constant interaction,” says Guerra.
More than three years in the making, Pradasphere also includes a library with publications ranging from “Prada a Milano” published in 1988 in collaboration with Albert Watson and stylist Manuela Pavesi to the publishing program that has chronicled since 1993 the exhibitions and architectural initiatives of Fondazione Prada and the collaborations with architecture firms.
Above Pradasphere sits a large suite of rooms for Very Important Clients, with women’s on one side of a large sitting room and men’s on the other. Off of these is a handbag room, and off of that is a high jewelry room. Here VICs can order any Prada product — or even custom ones — however they want. It is another example of the brand raising its service levels for high spenders.
Above this is the invitation-only Appartamento, which stands as a further testament to Prada’s imaginative world, where murals with Brutalist images by German photographic artist Andreas Gursky — a longtime collaborator — contrast with antique Italian furniture. The massive venue is used for private dinners and special occasions.
“This has been created millimeter by millimeter by Mrs. Prada going and looking for a certain kind of Milanese furniture from the 17th and 18th centuries,” Guerra says of the venue, which offers two bedrooms, several sitting rooms, a bathroom the size of a small apartment and an equally large kitchen.
Further proof that Miuccia’s touch is all over Pradasphere.