Images in this gallery are selected from
Prada: Creativity, Modernity, Innovation by Patrizio Bertelli and Miuccia Prada and published by Prada Progetto Arte. It retails for €100 at Prada stores, on prada.com, and in select bookstores.
“The purpose of this book is to retrace and represent the multivalent aspects of Prada: from fashion to communication, from the pursuit of excellence to technological advancement, from architecture to art,” Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli explain.
“Careful observation of and curiosity about the world, society, and culture are at the core of Prada’s creativity and modernity,” Prada and Bertelli said. “This pursuit has pushed Prada beyond the physical limitations of boutiques and showrooms, provoked an interaction with different and seemingly distant worlds, and introduced a new way to create a natural, almost fashionless fashion.”
Courtesy of Prada
Though Prada is most often thought of for its iconic fashions—like the shoes pictured here—the brand also extends into interior design, technological development, art commissions and collections and philanthropy.
Courtesy of Prada
In 1983, architect Roberto Baciocchi opened the first Green Store in Milan. The green shade used in the design would eventually go on to be known as “Prada Green.” Prada now has a number of stores worldwide that include the iconic color.
Courtesy of Prada
The Fondazione Prada is a nonprofit organization that was founded over 15 years ago by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. It often hosts contemporary art exhibitions in Milan.
Courtesy of Prada
The 23,000-square-foot Prada epicenter in SoHo was rumored to cost over $40 million and was built in a space that used to belong to the Guggenheim museum. The wave in the middle of the store rises from the ground floor and opens to the basement. It can be used both as a seating area for film screenings and performances and as a display area for clothing and shoes.
Courtesy of Prada
The advertisement for Prada’s spring 2009 women's collection was shot by photographer Steven Meisel and includes models Nimue Smit, Giedre Dukauskaite, Sigrid Agren, Toni Garrn, Katrin Thormann, Viktoriya Sasonkina and Ymre Stiekema, according to Haut Fashion.
Courtesy of Prada
German artist Carsten Höller thought up the The Double Club project for Fondazione Prada. London's Double Club is a public space near the Angel tube station that houses a bar, restaurant and dance club. Höller separated the spaces into Western and Congolese sections to represent the differences in the two cultures, reported Congo Magazine.
Courtesy of Prada
Located in Tokyo’s Aoyama district, the Japanese Prada building was the second epicenter after the New York flagship. Complete with six-story glass crystal, the space is lined with diamond-shaped glass panes—some of which jut out into a bubble and others which lie flat as “an interactive optical device,” said Jacques Herzog. “Because some of the glass is curved, it seems to move as you walk around it. That creates awareness of both the merchandise and the city—there's an intense dialogue between actors. Also, the grid brings a human scale to the architecture, like display windows. It's almost old-fashioned.”
Courtesy of Prada
Famed photographer Albert Watson admits he doesn’t shoot fashion that often anymore. “Basically, for 20 years I shot fashion, and as the work became a little bit stronger, fashion became a little bit trickier,” he said in an interview in 2004. “It's very difficult with fashion magazines these days to pick out an image and say, 'If I had done that, that would go into a retrospective show of mine.' It's very tricky.”
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Held in the Via Fogazzaro 36 space in Milan, Andreas Slominski’s installation displayed 15 works inspired by the idea of traps. “I just happened to be in front of a pet-shop, and I found something interesting from a sculptural point of view in the trap,” he said of his inspiration for the exhibit. “This was the ‘formula’ for me: The things I’d already done and those I still had to do seemed to be unexpectedly intertwined [....]. The trap as an object [...] has a specific character that other sculptures do not have. For me, it’s not a game, it’s something serious: a metaphor or a model, something that one can perceive directly, but that occupies its own space when observed from a distance.”
Courtesy of Prada
True to form for Prada, the new 708-page book is a sprawling work.
Courtesy of Prada
