Miuccia Prada has stamped her name on
an era by alleviating the isolation of creative people. For such sensitive
types, the ultimate luxury is to feel that they are part of a community.
This is the service Prada provides. She has made the world safe for people
with overdeveloped inner lives.
Fashion is one of the techniques she
has used to accomplish this. Her outspoken ambivalence about fashion is
another. Some designers struggle to make a statement. Prada evidently
struggles not to. She is an artist: she would rather hide than speak.
Sometimes, Prada hides behind the art
of others. The Prada Foundation, established in 1995 by Prada and her
husband, Patrizio Bertelli, is a shop window filled with masks. Directed
by the legendary critic and curator Germano Celant, the foundation
sponsors exhibitions and other worthy cultural causes. (The foundation has
a Web site: www.fondazioneprada.org.) In the past decade, it has presented
exhibitions by Tom Friedman, Anish Kapoor, Michael Heizer, Sam Taylor-Wood
and Louise Bourgeois, among others. Beautifully produced catalogs
accompany the shows.
Last year the foundation branched out
into philosophy. In November, it financed a new chair in aesthetics at the
University of Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan. The position will be held
by Massimo Cacciari, a former mayor of Venice who is perhaps Italy's most
celebrated theorist of art. In the United States, Cacciari is best known
for his scholarship on the art and architecture of Vienna at the turn of
the last century.
Most recently, Prada sponsored the
production of an hourlong film by the Milanese artist Francesco Vezzoli. A
dual tribute to Italian art-house cinema and American kitsch, the film
features appearances by Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Marianne
Faithfull. It had its premiere in Milan last month, along with Vezzoli's
ghost theater: an installation of 120 embroidered Charles Rennie
Mackintosh chairs.
All this is Prada. Prada, Prada, Prada.
As are the Prada shops designed by Rem Koolhaas and Herzog and de Meuron;
the church in suburban Milan transformed by Dan Flavin into a radiant
grotto; and the 2002 conference on contemporary social challenges
organized in collaboration with a Milanese prison.
That's a lot for a company that started
out as a maker of tastefully understated luggage. Or for a woman who
started out as a political activist for left-wing causes. But I confess I
will not be satisfied until Prada has personally designed an airport. And
perhaps even an airline to go with it. Global transportation
infrastructure: this seems to me the direction in which Prada is headed.
From baggage to baggage claim, Prada, Prada, Prada. With some shopping,
art and philosophy along the way.
Prada's cultural projects interest me
chiefly because they help to clarify the personality and intentions of a
fashion genius. No one needs Prada to gain access to the work of Louise
Bourgeois or Anish Kapoor. We admire her for the same reason we have
always admired Italians. No one can match their talent for engineering
mythologies of daily life. Since the 1960's, the Italians have exercised
that talent only sporadically on the world stage. Yet those with memories
of the postwar decades will not find it difficult to regard design as a
serious form of communication.
Nor should we see any inherent
contradiction between Prada's political sympathies and her success in
business. Poets hold things together. Italian poets -- in design, film and
fine art -- have been working the contradictions between politics and art
for a century and more. The work of Gio Ponti, Joe Colombo, the
Castiglione brothers still activate living memory, even if Milan is no
longer the design center it once was. The world is not what it was. What
good are home furnishings for a time when people are living out of
suitcases and scarcely have time to unpack?
Prada is onto something. People want
experiences now more than they want things. They want something other than
TV. They want excuses to be together in social space so they can figure
out how the contemporary city is supposed to work. Things provide the
excuses. They are pretexts for the authentic errand of being outside.
The Prada store that opened in New
York's SoHo district in December 2001 is a prime example of this. For
weeks before the opening, those of us who live downtown found ourselves at
the mercy of two equally unwelcome fantasies. Pundits wanted Lower
Manhattan to remain a dead zone, a backdrop for their moralistic
pronouncements. City planners wanted the place to be a shopping mall
thronged with happy-go-lucky but somber tourists.
We kept hearing that the community
wanted this, that the community didn't want that, and after all that
irrelevant chatter it was startling to come face to face with the
community itself at the opening of the Prada store. What the community
wanted was to be here.
If there was luxury in the air, it
wasn't coming from the clothes, the fancy in-store technology or even the
fabulous blocklong space. The luxury was making contact with people you
hadn't seen together in one place since 9/11. It was the experience of
being with the most solipsistic people on earth and loving them more than
ever.
Georges Bataille argued that all
culture is luxury. It's what we do with the energy that is left over after
our material needs are met. Luxury, in the modern sense, means the
transformation of the commonplace, in Arthur Danto's phrase. It means the
creation of value from unpromising situations. Frank Lloyd Wright created
luxury from empty space, Chanel from jersey sportswear, Louis Kahn from
poured concrete. Prada creates it out of the desire to be rescued from the
isolation that a creative life demands.
Francesco Vezzoli creates it from old
60's movies, television game shows and the desire for continuity with a
period he is too young to have known. Vezzoli's film is inspired by ''Comizi
D'Amore,'' a 1964 documentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The movie consists
of brief interviews, conducted with people across a broad spectrum of
Italian society, on the subjects of love and sexual mores. Vezzoli recasts
Pasolini for the age of Berlusconi.
Why are so many young artists
fascinated by the 1960's? Because the romantic concept of an avant-garde
bohemia breathed its last gasp then, I suppose. Thereafter, artists and
thinkers would have to share their space with pop musicians, fashion
photographers, advertisers and tourists. The space is getting crowded. But
in the labyrinth where ideas take shape, there is still only room for one
- by Herbert Muscap New
York Times Apr 11 2004
Teetering on high heels at the top of a
stair overlooking Mercer Street last Friday evening, the willowy Estée
Lauder model Carolyn Murphy surveyed a crowd of fashion's elite and
whispered, "This is so bizarre."
The occasion was a long-anticipated
party celebrating the opening of Prada's 24,000-square-foot store in SoHo.
Ms. Murphy could have been referring to the unseasonal December weather.
But she could easily have been editorializing about the crowd, a throng
drawn from a rarefied sphere where the worlds of business, fashion, film,
art and architecture intersect.
Who else besides Miuccia Prada and
Patrizio Bertelli, her husband and the chief executive of the Prada Group,
could lure Rudolph W. Giuliani, Kevin Spacey, Milla Jovovich and the
sculptor Mark di Suvero to the opening of a dress shop? What other
corporate magnates possess the vision and drive to defy a depressed market
and to commission world-class architects like Rem Koolhaas to erect
temples of retailing not just in New York but also in Tokyo, San
Francisco, Paris and Los Angeles? Who, at this grim moment for local
business, could propose anything approaching this couple's vision for a
downtown renewal hinged on a distinctly 21st-century fusion of mercantile
and cultural agendas?
In a sense, the evening was a triumph
for the owners of a privately held company whose fashions of the 1990's
transformed a family luggage firm, founded by Ms. Prada's grandfather
Mario in 1913, into a powerhouse with global sales of $1.4 billion last
year. Yet for all the flashbulb excitement, there was a bizarre cast to
the event, an anxiety detectible by anyone who has followed the fortunes
of a seemingly unassailable firm.
The finger-gnawing nervousness
displayed by Ms. Prada and Mr. Bertelli on Friday could have been chalked
up to social unease. But they also have ample cause to worry. Although
Prada sales last year increased by 56.6 percent, and the company posted
24.9 percent sales growth in the first half of 2001, it continues to
grapple with a $1.6 billion debt load. It was accumulated over a
three-year acquisitions binge, when demand for its $375 shoes and $1,200
chemises seemed insatiable. Now it is struggling with the burden of prime
real estate bought at market peak, and a sense in some quarters that the
label is in danger of losing its cachet.
Over the course of its buying spree,
Prada acquired controlling interest in Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Church's
shoes, Azzedine Alaïa, Carshoe and the Genny Group, along with a sizeable
hunk of Fendi.
But an initial public offering the
company planned, to raise money to cover the debt of these acquisitions
and to fuel expansion, was called off twice this year because of the
global downturn, most recently after Sept. 11. Steven Greenberg, the
president of the Greenberg Group, retail analysts, was not alone in noting
that the expansions initiated by Mr. Bertelli would have been next to
impossible in a publicly traded firm. "He has built himself a house
of cards," Mr. Greenberg said.
When the stock offering was
indefinitely postponed for the second time, there was talk that Prada
would be forced to sell some of its brands. And by the end of November, it
did indeed sell a 25.5. percent stake in Fendi to L.V.M.H. Moët Hennessey
Louis Vuitton for $260 million, and the company was reported in the trade
press to be shopping the labels of both Ms. Sander and Helmut Lang. Last
week in New York, Mr. Bertelli, whose company had denied the brands were
for sale, declined to comment. Two days before the gala opening of the
resplendent SoHo store, Prada announced a $624.1 million bond to help
offset its huge debt.
As a luxury brand with democratic
ambitions, Prada is caught in marketing limbo. Now that it has expanded to
150 stores worldwide, with five in Manhattan alone, its survival as a
business is contingent on reaching a broad market — while also retaining
the intrinsic cachet of being the cognoscenti's chosen brand. Some
industry analysts see these goals as conflicting. "They're never
going to be the inner-circle kid anymore," said Donny Deutsch, the
chief executive of Deutsch Inc., the advertising agency, and a longtime
Prada customer. "By definition they're victims of their own
success."
Perhaps too pervasive these days to
excite the fickle appetites of the fanatical style makers who established
the brand, Prada has yet to infitrate the consciousness (and pocketbooks)
of a mass market. It is not alone in being an apparel company that cannot
afford the luxury of catering to fashion insiders.
One measure of the extent to which the
Milan-based company falls below the radar of many American women was
provided last week when Women's Wear Daily published the results of a
survey to determine the 100 most recognizable international fashion
brands. The study found that, while Calvin Klein, Gucci, Christian Dior,
Chanel and Givenchy were all ranked in the top 100, Prada's name was
nowhere to be found.
At a news conference in June, Mr.
Bertelli played down the effects of the American economic slowdown on a
saturated high end sector. Quick reflexes, he said, "are
essential."
Yet it is those very reflexes that
critics have begun calling into question. Among the problems that have
beset Mr. Bertelli's expansion, the best documented are his creative
disputes with Ms. Sander, who, to widespread astonishment, defected in
January 2000 from the label that bore her name. Fashion insiders were
surprised when Mr. Bertelli gave evidence of his management style by
taking over not just the Jil Sander business but, for one season at least,
the design of its clothes.
There is also the question of whether
the architectural grandiosity of Prada's retail expansion — the SoHo
store alone is estimated to have cost $40 million, and another Koolhaas-
designed showplace in San Francisco has been delayed for expensive
earthquake-proofing — represents a lapse in business judgment, as some
analysts contend. "These huge capital expenditures can be very
telling on your net profitability," Mr. Greenberg said.
Prada opened 26 stores around the world
in 1998 alone. And while the company shuttered its Prada Sport store on
Wooster Street last week, it will maintain four emporiums and one outpost
of Miu Miu, all within a two-and-a-half-mile stretch from upper Madison
Avenue to the new Prince Street store, where its less than tony neighbors
include Zale's and Ann Taylor Loft.
"We don't feel we're
overexposed," Mr. Bertelli said last week, when asked if Prada was in
danger of glutting the luxury marketplace. "We have 150 stores around
the world — compare that to our competitors." Chanel has 105.
Gucci, which has 153, maintains a single, hugely profitable outpost in
Manhattan on Fifth Avenue.
Despite the financial uncertainties,
both Mr. Bertelli and Ms. Prada seem committed to the notion that
experimental store design will keep vital the company's innovative image.
"To go on being creative," Ms. Prada said, "that is the
only way to fight overexposure."
As a strategy, the creation of
elaborate retail stores is "high risk high reward or no reward,"
said Carol Murray, an apparel and footwear analyst in the equity research
division of Solomon Smith Barney. "Successful retail strategies go
back to germane, relevant, must-have products." Why, if its product
is so robust, does the SoHo store bill itself as a purveyor of vintage
Prada clothing? A part of the store has been turned over to the sale of
Prada shoes, prints and handbags from earlier and more influential
seasons.
Additionally, among retailers, shoppers
and fashion observers interviewed, there was a sense that the Prada
devotee is no longer as single- minded in her obsession as she was in the
label's undisputed heyday, just a few years back.
"Prada developed the idea that you
have to have that one single handbag each season or that important pair of
shoes," said one major retailer whose store carries Prada. Once
famous for their willingness to go lemminglike from floral appliquéd Mary
Jane shoes one season to a razor-toed Bond girl pump the next, the Prada
fan may have moved on. "These women don't look at Prada and say,
`What do I have to have from Prada?' anymore," the retailer said.
Not since the company engineered the
design feat of transforming a clunky bowling bag into an $800 fashion
essential in the spring of 2000 has Prada scored a major runaway success.
If, as analysts suggest, accessories are the cornerstone of the luxury
market, it is worth noting that it is Balenciaga's grommeted $950 shoulder
bag that sold out all year at both downtown boutiques like Kirna Zabête
and Barneys New York
, while the widely copied Prada bowling bags turned up for $299 at
Loehmann's, alongside other markdowns.
"I don't want some brand trophy
right now, especially one as easy as Prada," said Priscilla Glover,
an avid shopper who lives in Paris and New York. "I want something
original, special, beautiful, charming and even precious, and I haven't
found that at Prada in over a year."
Linda Dresner stopped carrying Prada at
her store in Birmingham, Mich., 18 months ago because, Ms. Dresner said,
"there was just too much of it around."
In response to the issue of keeping
Prada fresh, Mr. Bertelli countered: "The novelty we've introduced is
that instead of going on with uniformity, we have created unique and
unusual environments," referring to the highly conceptual store
designs. "The product now is so strong it no longer requires a
sameness of spaces."
It would appear that the Prada strategy
is to invigorate the act of shopping by creating museums of consumerism,
which like all good museums today come complete with a self-critique. In
an introduction to a specially published book documenting Mr. Koolhaas's
architectural collaborations with Prada, he offers what could be read as
an analysis of the philosophical problems underlying Prada's growing
pains. "In a world where everything is shopping . . . and shopping is
everything . . . what is luxury?" Mr. Koolhaas asks.
"Luxury is not shopping," Mr.
Koolhaas concludes. - By Guy Trebay and Ginia
Bellafante New
York Times
LONDON, May 12 2002— After two
false starts, Prada is expected to say this week that it will proceed with
a plan to sell 30 percent of itself to the public in an initial stock
offering, people close to the company said today.
Patrizio Bertelli, Prada's chief
executive, is expected to provide more details of the plan on Thursday,
during a news conference in Milan. The stock sale, which is scheduled for
midsummer and could value the company at roughly $4 billion, would be one
of the largest initial public offerings this year, and would serve as a
barometer for other companies seeking to tap the public markets. The sale
is expected to raise about $1.2 billion.
The proceeds will be used to pay down
about $1.1 billion in debt amassed over the course of a buying spree in
which Prada, the Milan-based fashion house, acquired controlling stakes in
a wide range of companies. They include Jil Sander, Helmut Lang, Church's
shoes, Azzedine Alaïa, Carshoe and the Genny Group, along with a sizable
hunk of Fendi, which it later sold to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Despite an economic slowdown and the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, events that caused Prada to cancel plans to go
public on two previous occasions, the company continued to open lavish
stores. Its latest in SoHo, designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas, cost
an estimated $40 million. Prada now owns 150 boutiques in Manhattan, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Milan and Tokyo.
When the stock offering was
indefinitely postponed for a second time, Prada found itself strapped for
cash. By the end of November, it sold a 25.5 percent stake in Fendi to
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton for $260 million. And in December,
Deutsche Bank underwrote a $624.1 million bond sale that can be converted
into Prada shares if the company goes public within three years.
Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas are
jointly underwriting Prada's stock sale.
The designer Miuccia Prada and her
husband, Mr. Bertelli, who control Prada, transformed a family luggage
business, founded by Ms. Prada's grandfather Mario in 1913, into a world
class brand by selling must-have shoes and handbags like the $800 bowling
ball bag that was a fashion essential in 2000.
Aside from overextending itself
financially, Prada's expansion has been besieged by other problems,
notably Mr. Bertelli's management style. For instance, he clashed with Ms.
Sander, who shocked the fashion world when she defected in January 2000
from the label that bears her name.
Luxury goods companies in general have
struggled since Sept. 11, when many consumers held off making large or
extravagant purchases. Mr. Bertelli indicated earlier this year that
demand was starting to pick up, noting that Prada's sales had risen by
double-digits in the United States and Japan. He is expected to provide
more details about the company's performance this week. -
New
York Times
It used to be that a visit to a
high-end fashion boutique meant snooty, pencil-thin sales representatives
and stark, minimalist design. It wasn't much of a sensory experience, but
it didn't need to be. Customers came for the clothes; the surroundings
were peripheral.
Yesterday's opening of Prada's
23,000-square-foot flagship store in New York may have changed all that.
The SoHo store promises to be as exciting for gearheads and art lovers as
it is for fashionistas. Designed by experimental architect Rem Koolhaas,
the store combines art, technology and upscale fashion to create a unique
retail experience.
Not so long ago, an architect of
Koolhaas's stature rarely designed retail outlets. But this past October,
celebrity architect Frank Gehry completed the Issey Miyake flagship store
in New York's Tribeca district. Koolhaas, who will soon join Gehry in the
upper echelon of architects who have built Guggenheim museums, is
apparently as enthusiastic about designing for Prada as the company is
about having him. He's designing similar outlets in San Francisco and Los
Angeles and has published Projects for Prada Part 1, a book detailing his
plans for the company.
Highlights of the New York store
include a hanging installation of an abstract city as well as a giant
mural by German photographer Andreas Gursky, fresh from an exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art. But while the concept of store-as-gallery may
have been done before, it's the technological gadgets in the store that
are grabbing all the attention, even if sometimes the effect seems more
tilted to showboating than practicality.
The transparent glass doors on the
dressing rooms, for instance, appear to be designed for voyeurs. But
customers who would rather not undress in front of New York's fashion
elite need not worry: Upon entry, the liquid-crystal display doors turn
opaque.
The dressing rooms are also fitted with
video screens instead of mirrors, allowing slow-motion modelling of
potential purchases. Should you decide to buy, you can use the store's
computers to find recommended matching items. As well, the "style
scanners" can instantly check for items in your size and create a
personal account on the company's Web site, which you can later access
from home.
The infrastructure of the store is
similarly futuristic. Transparent display cases hang from a network of
motorized tracks on the ceiling. The push of a button reorganizes the
entire store, moving all the displays to one side for parties or fashion
shows.
The boutique will need all the
technical wizardry and artistic glamour it can muster. Prada is said to
have spent copious sums of money on the store, though when asked how much
it all cost, CEO Patrizio Bertelli would only tell reporters "the
right amount." The SoHo district is a few blocks north of the ruins
of the World Trade Center, and pedestrian traffic has dropped off
dramatically since the terrorist attacks.
The company remains unbowed, however.
The store's prospects are being carefully watched, and it's not just the
fashion world that's holding its breath. Even Popular Science, the
old-school geek periodical of choice, has profiled the store. The magazine
fearlessly hopes the store's technology catches on, making "an
afternoon of clothes shopping as much fun as a trip to Circuit City."
- Saturday
Post article by Benjamin Errett
