Founded as a luxury leather goods house in 1913 in Milan, Prada entered the field of fashion when Miuccia Prada took the helm of the family company in 1979. After initially focusing exclusively on accessories, she presented the house’s first fashion collection in 1988. She would soon transform Prada into one of the world’s most influential luxury brands with a deeply personal, sophisticated and subtly subversive approach. 

This definitive publication opens with a concise history of the house, followed by a brief biographical profile of Miuccia Prada, before exploring the collections themselves, organized chronologically. Each collection is introduced by a short text unveiling its influences and highlights, and illustrated with carefully curated catwalk images that showcase hundreds of spectacular clothes, details, accessories, beauty looks and set designs – and, of course, the top fashion models who wore them on the runway, from Naomi Campbell and Gisele to Kate Moss and Kaia Gerber. A rich reference section, including an extensive index, concludes the book.

About the Author

Susannah Frankel is editor-in-chief of Another magazine. Previously, fashion director of Grazia magazine, she was fashion editor of the Independent from 1999 to 2012. She is the author of Visionaries – Interviews With Fashion Designers and has contributed to many books and exhibition catalogues, including Dries Van Noten 1–100, Stephen Jones: Souvenirs, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and The House of Viktor & Rolf.

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Founded in 1913, Prada has evolved into a brand with a unique ability to embed thought-provoking, clever ideas in totally pleasurable objects — from shoes and bags to coats, dresses, and skirts, the clothing makes a statement. And Pradasphere — both in its package and content — does the same.

Pradasphere is a collection of archival objects arranged to reveal the complex, often- intertwined obsessions of one of the world’s most influential designers. The book takes you on an aesthetic journey that spans the past 30 years. Exclusive photographs of clothing and accessories illustrate Prada’s design narrative and show the exquisite craftsmanship and materials behind the creations. Pradasphere also explores Prada’s culture, including advertising photography, architecture, and commissioned films by directors such as Wes Anderson and Ridley Scott.

About the authors:

Michael Rock is a founding partner and creative director at 2x4 and director of the Graphic Architecture Project at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Stephanie Murg is the editor of UnBeige, a design blog that has been featured in the New York Times and Newsweek. She writes about art and all forms of design.

Although separated by time, Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli-both Italian, both feminists-share striking affinities in terms of their design strategies and fashion manifestoes.

Presented as an intimate "conversation," Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations aims to tease out formal and conceptual similarities between the two designers. Striking photographs and insightful texts illustrate the parallels between the two, including their preferences for interesting textiles and prints, eccentric color palettes, and a bold and playful approach to styling and accessories.

Schiaparelli, in the 1920s through 50s, and Prada, from the late 1980s to today, exploited the narrative possibilities of prints, sought out unconventional textiles, played with ideas of good and bad taste, and manipulated scale for surrealistic outcomes. Contemporary art plays a major role in the work of these inventive women-Schiaparelli in her famous collaborations with Dali and Cocteau, and Prada via her Fondazione Prada.

Blending the historic with the contemporary, the catalogue brings the masterworks of both designers together into a grand conversation between the most important women fashion designers to ever emerge from Italy.

Prada is the first book that documents three decades of ground-breaking fashion, architecture, film and art by the Prada company, including the work of the design studio and the workshop; extensive creative partnerships with photographers, designers, architects and film directors; and large scale architectural commissions, the Fondazione Prada, and the development of a new museum.

Among the many features of this rich innovative book with its thousands of images are a photo-essay by renowned photographer Brigitte Lacombe, stills taken from short films documenting the craftsmanship of the factory, images of the unique fashion show environments, an overview of all Miuccia Prada's collections with thumbnail pictures of 3,885 different “looks,” collages of the most influential shoe and bags, photographs of the final product on the runway, celebrated store designs in New York and Los Angeles by Rem Koolhaas/OMA and in Tokyo by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, a film collaboration with director Ridley Scott, Koolhaas’s radical “Prada Transformer” pavilion in Seoul, costume designs for a Japanese manga heroine, Prada found on the street and celebrities photographed on the red carpet, and blogs expressing the almost fanatical devotion of lovers of the brand.

Prada both chronicles and epitomizes the achievements of one of the world's most influential and enlightened fashion and design companies.