Prada: The Milanese Shop That Began a Fashion Legacy

In 1913 a shop selling luxury travel goods and accessories opened beneath the glass vault of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Its proprietor was Mario Prada, grandfather of Miuccia Prada. The house's own history credits Mario as founder; several later accounts add his brother Martino and give the original name of the business as Fratelli Prada. Either way, the beginning was a retail enterprise, not a fashion label: a place where travellers bought the cases, trunks and accessories that a long journey required.

An address in the Galleria

The setting mattered. The Galleria, whose first stone was laid in 1865 to designs by Giuseppe Mengoni, was conceived as a covered street between the Piazza del Duomo and the Piazza della Scala, at the civic and commercial heart of the city. Opening there placed a young business in front of a moneyed, mobile clientele. According to the house, the shop became a favoured destination for European aristocracy and the upper classes.

The interior was conceived with the same care. Prada records that Mario Prada commissioned a British architect to design and make the mahogany shelving, part of an interior that the Galleria shop still preserves.

What the shop sold

The stock reflected the habits of an affluent traveller in the early twentieth century: hand-made bags, trunks, leather accessories and beauty cases. Several accounts add that the shop imported English steamer trunks and handbags alongside its own goods, which would place it within an international trade in travel equipment rather than in a purely local craft tradition.

Travel goods of this period were judged first by their construction. A trunk had to protect its contents through railway and steamship journeys; a beauty case had to keep bottles and brushes in place. The prestige of the object depended on materials and workmanship, but also on where it was bought and how it was presented. Prada's early identity rested on both.

The royal appointment of 1919

In 1919 Prada was named Official Supplier to the Italian Royal Household. The appointment allowed the business to incorporate the coat of arms of the House of Savoy and a knotted-rope motif into its logo. For a Milanese retailer, the warrant was a public guarantee of quality and an indication of the clientele the shop had attracted within six years of opening.

From retailer to fashion house

For most of the twentieth century Prada remained a family business devoted to leather goods. After Mario Prada's death in 1958 it passed to his daughter Luisa. The decisive change came with the next generation. Miuccia Prada, Luisa's daughter, entered the business in the 1970s, and the Prada Group dates her meeting with the entrepreneur Patrizio Bertelli to 1977, describing it as the start of a new business model for the brand's international development. The men's collection and the Miu Miu label followed in 1993.

The distinction between the two phases should be kept clear. Mario Prada founded a shop; Miuccia Prada, with Bertelli as business partner, built the fashion house that later made the name internationally known. Her aesthetic, often concerned with intellectual tension, unexpected materials and an ambivalent relationship with conventional elegance, belongs to that later history and should not be projected back onto the 1913 enterprise.

Continuity and difference

What connects the two phases is less a style than a material discipline: leather, construction and the presentation of objects. What changed was the role of the object. An early Prada trunk was a prestigious purchase for a practical purpose; a later Prada design often functions as a statement about taste and about fashion itself. Both can be read as evidence of their time.