Prada S.p.A.

Mario Prada opened a leather goods shop in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913, selling handbags, luggage, and accessories made from walrus hide and English steamer trunks. The shop was appointed official supplier to the Italian Royal House. Mario Prada built a reputation for quality and discretion. He also held a firm conviction, which he stated explicitly, that women should not be involved in running a business. His granddaughter Miuccia would prove him comprehensively wrong.

Miuccia Prada inherited the family business in 1978, having studied political science and trained as a mime artist. She had no fashion training. The company was struggling — sales were minimal, the brand had no direction, and several family members had already given up and sold their stakes. Miuccia, working with businessman Patrizio Bertelli who later became her husband, decided to rebuild the company around a single product: a black nylon backpack.

Prada's black nylon backpack, launched in 1985 and made from the industrial nylon used in military parachutes, was deliberately anti-fashionable — plain, functional, and made from a material associated with cheap utility rather than luxury. It became one of the most influential fashion objects of the 1980s, precisely because it rejected the prevailing aesthetic of visible logos and obvious luxury. Miuccia described her design philosophy as "making the ugly beautiful" and the beautiful "slightly wrong." Fashion critics initially couldn't decide whether to celebrate or condemn her. Eventually they did both.

Prada had launched the Miu Miu label in 1993 — named after Miuccia's childhood nickname — as a younger, more playful sister brand to Prada's intellectual severity. By 2000, Prada had acquired Church's shoes, Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, and a stake in Azzedine Alaïa, creating a mini-conglomerate. Most of these acquisitions were subsequently sold; Prada's attempt at empire-building proved less successful than its core luxury positioning. The company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2011.

The 2006 film "The Devil Wears Prada," based on Lauren Weisberger's novel about a fictional fashion magazine, featured Meryl Streep as a thinly veiled Anna Wintour character named Miranda Priestly — who wore Prada exclusively. The film introduced Prada to hundreds of millions of people who had never engaged with fashion. Miranda Priestly's line — "That's all" — delivered after explaining that cerulean blue had been decided in the Prada collection before trickling down to discount bins, became one of the most quoted passages in fashion culture and the definitive articulation of how high fashion influences everything below it.