subject: Miuccia Prada: The Queen Of Art [print this page] Miuccia Prada: the Queen of Art Miuccia Prada: the Queen of Art
Miuccia Prada becomes the queen of art by means of a talented mind. Together with her husband, they build up the Prada Art fund which represents her intelligent mind.
Prada is one of the most famous fashion workshops in the world, however, it is not just a fashion workshop, and instead, it becomes a kind of art under the control of Muccia Prada. Suzy Menkes, the International Herald Tribunes fashion editor, says: Miuccia captures the Zeitgeist. She is conceptual fashion person who realizes which way the wind is blowing.
1995, Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli built up Fondazione Prada. For many years, this project has attracted a great number of designers and artists. In 1997, the photographic artist Andreas Gursky produced a series of sleek images of details of Prada stores. Then in 2005, the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset made a Prada store (unauthorised, and with no sales) in the middle of the desert at Marfa, Texas. Now the Chinese artist Cao Fei, who specialises in installations about consumerism, wants to open a fake Prada factory in China. A brilliant idea, says Ms Prada, but one could be dangerous for the firm because the question of fakes is a hot topic.
She was educated in the revolutionary 1960s and 1970s to be an intellectual at a time when the Italian intelligentsia was almost exclusively left wing. No surprise, therefore, that she was a communist and a feminist. It also explains why she does not hang out with celebs; she is simply too cultivated and too grand for them to add anything to her life.
Miuccia Prada had been learning mime with the Teatro Piccolo of Milan for five years when she was called to enter the firm, aged 29. She says she now realises that the world of fashion, despite its absurdity, does contain many open-minded and creative people. She used to be annoyed when intellectuals sneered at Pradas involvement in art, which began in 1993. Now Im very interested in the power of brands, of celebrity, in the absurdity and scandals of that world, because I realize that I can play on many levels, for if culture isnt appealing, it has no impact. When its too high-faulting and fails to communicate with young and ordinary people, its equivalent to not speaking at all.
