KEY POINTS:
Prada became the first Italian fashion designer to sign up to Peta's campaign to drive fur out of fashion when she announced, the day after a lone campaigner hurled himself at her catwalk show, that she was "bored with fur".
Boredom is different from revulsion. And boredom can, within the space of a Milan season, turn into its opposite. Furthermore, there were large grey feathers conspicuously adorning some bags in her latest show. If this is the beginnings of a bandwagon, more, they hope, will soon climb aboard. And it might be so, because Miuccia Prada, the Oracle of Via Fogazzaro (location of her headquarters in Milan), has always been way ahead of the pack.
In 2008 it will be 20 years since she launched her first womenswear collection, but the critics of her fur-less Fall 2007 show in Milan last week were as ecstatic as ever.
"Milan's most aware designer has thrown a wrench in the fashion works," concluded Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune.
"What was new? Everything ... For all the weirdness of her vision [she is] light years ahead of the rest."
With the release of the film The Devil Wears Prada, Miuccia now finds herself cast as a symbol and personification of the rarefied and peculiar world where ladies of a certain age in sunglasses get together in Milan, Paris and New York to gaze glassily at endless processions of swaying beanpoles.
And the irony of that, which is certainly not lost on Prada, is that for all her staggering success she remains the world's most unlikely fashion designer, is an anti-fashionista to the soles of her brown, flat, frumpish, orthopaedic-looking sandals. How so?
Well, for a start she is a woman, which already puts her in a small minority among the top designers. She is brainy and left wing. She is heterosexual, with two teenage sons by her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli. She loves tramping through the northern Italian mountains - one reviewer thought she spotted the influence of the mountain scenery in her latest womenswear collection.
The other big designers relish the roars of applause at the end of their catwalk shows, the troops of models pretending to swoon over them, the vast bouquets. Miuccia Prada doesn't want to even have to pretend to be part of that world. She might poke her head out for a fraction when it's all over.
She is a child of her class and city but more particularly, and pertinently, of her generation. And it is the tensions and contradictions between those different influences that make her work so pregnant and unpredictable. She was born in 1949, a child of the solid, affluent, conservative upper middle class of Milan. She was of a generation that became fiercely politicised by the Vietnam War, by Italy's continued subjection to the will of the United States, which conspired with the Christian Democrats to keep the Italian Communist Party out of power throughout the Cold War.
Miuccia Prada joined the Communist Party and graduated from university in political science. A communist past is nothing unusual in today's Italian elite; it would be truer to say it is de rigueur.
But in the fashion world, her persistent left-ish political inclination, her irony and her sheer brains make her exceptional.
The root of her work is the conservatism and restraint that are so typical of bourgeois Milan and so at odds with the world's image of Italy, and which she absorbed with her mother's minestrone.
But this conservatism is constantly punctured and subverted by a whole mad world of motley influences and by an almost childish compulsion to do what everybody says you mustn't.
"Whatever Mrs P is on to next is bound to throw ready-made vocabulary and easy references into disarray," wrote Sarah Mower on Style.com last week.
"How to capture the meaning of a show that started with a plain grey mannish coat and then moved into boxy, furry, laminated, bubbling, natural-cum-synthetic colour and texture? The colour blocking was brilliantly original and further offset by the bonkers footless two-tone socks ... Miuccia created a collection that seems destined to be one of the pivotal influences of the season."
What is extraordinary is how, after 20 years at the top and at the helm of a wealthy conglomerate, "she continues to take the most unbelievable risks" as the Independent's fashion editor, Susannah Frankel, puts it.
Collections consistently steam up the sunglasses of those formidable women in the front row - and yet, by some weird mutation of the zeitgeist, when they arrive in the stores six months later, they are exactly what women want.
- INDEPENDENT
