To know Laia Garcia-Furtado is to understand that she’s obsessed with Prada. Indeed, it’s one of her most obvious traits. During her tenure as senior fashion news editor here at Vogue, she spoke at length about her expertise on Miuccia Prada on our podcast, “The Run-Through,” and wrote countless odes to her beloved brand. So when she was approached by an editor at Batsford Books with a proposal to write a book on Prada, it felt preordained. “I feel like I’ve been training my entire life for this,” she said. Still, as an editor herself, Garcia-Furtado had to gut-check herself. “I quickly remembered that there’s a lot more to ’90s Prada than those legendary collections that came in the second half of the decade.”
Her new book Prada in the Nineties comes at a great time for the new generation of Miuccia-heads, discovering the brand on social media. “I think everyone is still so obsessed with the ’90s because, looking back, we think of it as the last decade of a kind of freedom,” Garcia-Furtado explains. “The Internet was barely beginning, and people still dressed to their own spirit. But I think for Prada, especially, this is the decade where it went from a kind of fledgling label to the global behemoth it is today.” She adds that it was during this period that Mrs. Prada discovered her voice and encompassing vision for what the brand would one day become. “All those ’90s collections are still constantly referenced to this day.”
Even as a devotee, the research process yielded a treasure trove of information about Mrs. Prada, like the fact that the designer’s spring 1999 collection was actually her way of fighting back against the trends of the ’90s (trends, of course, she helped popularize). “The spring 1999 collection with mirror embellishments was her sort of ‘taking the piss’ to the hippie trend that was happening around the time,” says Garcia-Furtado. “I love when you see her humor peeking through, and that really reminded me of the lace collection from fall 2008—another one of my all-time favorites—that she said she made because she hated lace.”
Because the book is unauthorized and unapproved by Prada—as she wittily notes on her cover—Garcia-Furtado tapped illustrator Rachel Song to reimagine her favorite collections (think a chinoiserie look on page 133 or the spring 1999 bumbag on page 167). When asked if she’s sent a copy to Prada headquarters yet, she had a pithy reply: “You can’t just reach out to God like that.” Here’s to hoping a copy makes its way to Milan regardless.
