Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well. Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history. Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods. That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass.
It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s. Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand. The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t. On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins. Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication. There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes. These embellishments are all slightly oversized –they’re more than just ornaments – and fastened with visible stitching and hardware. There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing. But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands.
