Their companies are merging, but the two women - Miuccia Prada and Donatella Versace - could not be more different.
Last week’s big Italian fashion news is the stuff of an Edith Wharton novel: Miuccia Prada, the intellectual matriarch of an old-money fashion behemoth from the chilly, stylish north comes
On Thursday, Prada – in a move widely speculated for months – bought Versace for €1.25 billion (about $2.4b), from Capri Holdings.
“We love the brand. We have a lot of ideas,” said Andrea Guerra, the CEO of Prada Group – which also includes Miu Miu, Church’s and a froufrou Milanese pastry shop, among other businesses, and has experienced a jaw-dropping era of creative and financial success amid a global downturn in the luxury business – in a call following the announcement.
This coming together is not a cultural exchange, per se; neither will be creatively involved in each other’s brands, and Donatella is taking on a new role within her namesake company. As rumours about the sale swirled last month, Donatella said she would step down as chief creative officer, taking on an unprecedented role as a chief brand ambassador, a title usually used for celebrities contractually obligated to wear a label’s clothes. The shift will cement her as the ultimate celebrity designer: an influencer whose product to promote is herself, her world. Her replacement is Dario Vitale – who was most recently the design and image director at Miu Miu.
This merger is fashion history as seen through the eyes of screwball director Howard Hawks: one brand, Prada, all about the brains, and another, Versace, all about the bod. This is a story about how in fashion, the machinations of swaps, deals and power are more the stuff of epic novels (or cinema) than the paper-pushing of other industries. And how two very different women – one a champion of an intellectual but never stodgy breed of minimalism, and the other a champion of vulgarity and excess as a gateway to spiritual liberation – are philosophically coming together in a moment defined by potent nationalism, the potential doom of tariffs and a widespread scepticism of luxury.
Prada was founded over a century ago in Milan as a maker of leather trunks. Miuccia Prada, now 75, pursued a PhD in political science, studied mime and, like many women of her generation, joined Italy’s communist party, attending protests in vintage Yves Saint Laurent. In the 1980s, she began producing a line of ready-to-wear that was (and remains) audacious in its reference material: old Italian movies, prints or shapes that are broadly considered ugly or unrefined and a lust-worthy shoe or handbag might all appear in one collection. Prada is determined, even dogged about ideas: she once told me a collection was about “being wrong”. Ingrid Sischy, the late fashion journalist who was a longtime close friend to Miuccia, once told her that “each of [her] collections is some kind of throwing down the gauntlet to established ways of thinking”. In 2020, she began co-designing Prada with Raf Simons, an arrangement unprecedented in fashion, with its exaltation of the singular creative lead.
Versace, started in 1978 by Donatella’s late brother Gianni, had a scrappier origin story. The Versace siblings “could hardly have come from more humble origins,” Deborah Ball wrote in her 2010 biography, “House of Versace.” Gianni championed the tacky and embraced what the late Richard Martin, curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, called “the streetwalker’s bravado and conspicuous wardrobe,” earning success when the newly rich of the 1980s hungered for something flashier than the tasteful offerings of Giorgio Armani or Valentino Garavani. “I think he’s the first great post-Freudian designer,” Martin told Robin Givhan in 1997. “I think part of it was his love for sensuality and sexuality. … He had no hang-ups.”
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Advertise with NZME.And Donatella was his ultimate muse. The New Yorker once observed that she “had come from Gianni, like a rib taken from his side. … She was the gay man’s version of a trophy wife – a trophy sister.” She has been plagued throughout her life by insecurities: “The most insecure person I know is me,” she once told me, though she’s known throughout the world, imitated on Saturday Night Live and played in a soapy Ryan Murphy miniseries by Penélope Cruz, as a queen of total confidence. It was Donatella who had the intuition for celebrities – that Madonna, Naomi Campbell and Elizabeth Hurley could catapult her brother’s safety pins, chain mail and crazy printed shirts to dinner table conversation.
Even the end of Gianni Versace’s life was as big as fiction or film: he was murdered in 1997 on the steps of his Miami mansion, in a Gatsby-esque tragedy. When Donatella took on the brand after her brother’s death, it seemed unlikely she could carry it forward – and yet with Undine Spragg-y determination, she did, yanking fashion into the realm of pop culture as no designer had before with moments like Jennifer Lopez’s eye-popping 2000 Grammys dress, Paris Hilton in spangly chain mail and January Jones in tomato red fringe.
Yet at times it seemed, particularly over the past decade, her self-doubt could cloud her judgment, and a genius collection, like a pre-Oscars master class in sexy, perfect tailoring, shown under the shadow of the Hollywood sign in 2023, could be followed by floppy dud.
Now the empires nurtured by these two very unusual women are merging to create what the men behind them believe will be the next great fashion conglomerate.
Prada painted this acquisition as a study in contrasts. “A lot of people may think that it’s far away from the aesthetics of our existing brands portfolio, like Miu Miu and Prada - but I think this is exactly a strength for our group because there are no overlaps, in terms of creativity, in terms of customer,” said chief marketing officer Lorenzo Bertelli, the son of Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, who serves as Prada Group’s chairman and executive director. “You will not create that kind of echo effect of taking customers from each other.”
Even their approaches to their pale locks are diametrically opposed: Donatella has an elaborate routine – “Clairol 7th Stage Crème Hair Lightener, with one sachet of activator with oxygen at 30 volumes,” her hairstylist once told me – while Prada lets the sun lighten her hair, and has her runway hairstylist Guido Palau trim her locks backstage when they get a bit long.
Yet both women share a few essential qualities: a commitment to seeing the world on their own terms. An eyebrow permanently raised at the conservative hivemind of the bourgeoisie. And maybe most importantly, inside of every woman – perhaps every person – there is a bit of both blondes.
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