For today’s episode of The Run-Through, presented by Prada, Chloe sat down with the two co-creative directors of Prada, Mrs. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, in their first-ever joint podcast interview. They covered everything from the Prada show earlier this week to their respective design philosophies and favorite soups.
They started with the latest collection, which debuted mere hours before Vogue World: Milano, before going back to the beginning. “I became a fashion designer because I didn’t find anything to wear,” Mrs. Prada explained. “I don’t dedicate a lot of time to dressing.” (Simons countered this by stating that while that may technically be true, “It never looks like a fast decision to me. It always looks very sophisticated.”)
Reflecting on her legacy, Mrs. Prada commented that her chief contribution to fashion was “reality. Fashion is only about glamour and beauty and actually life is so much the opposite.” When asked about what she makes of the present fascination with vintage and the styles of the previous decades, she had some wisdom. “ I think that in this moment people are very interested in the past because the present and the future are so scary. No one is able to envision a future. People are scared and want to be bound to something, otherwise you are lost. It’s an instinct of survival, probably.”
Mrs. Prada has long liked the word useful. She sees it as her obligation to design with utility in mind. “At the end of the day, I work for a commercial company that has to sell, so I am not an artist. In our field, you have to try to be useful, and creativity for the sake of creativity, if it’s useless, is really not good.” Listen to the full conversation above.
