Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (7 page)

Pinault laughed. “What, do you think I was going to ring him up and say, ‘
Cher ami,
I’m stealing Gucci away from you?’”

Ford was soon designing both Saint Laurent and Gucci, and he and De Sole applied the vertical integration model to Saint Laurent to turn it into a global luxury brand. It took a lot of work. Saint Laurent’s former business head Pierre Bergé was of the old licensing school. When PPR took over Saint Laurent, it had
167
contracts with licensees for everything from clothing to cigarette lighters. It only had thirteen directly owned stores worldwide. PPR acquired a few more classic houses—including Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, and the jeweler Boucheron—which were renovated (with a new designer at the helm) and streamlined. It also financed the launch of two new labels: Stella McCartney, who left her design post at Chloé, and Alexander McQueen, who quit Givenchy. In April
2004
, Ford and De Sole left Gucci Group because PPR wanted to take away their autonomy and have them report to senior group executives—in other words, more corporatization.

Gucci’s victory against Arnault was significant: it was the first time Arnault was beaten at his own game. The loss was stinging: “Bernard Arnault hates to lose,” a close Arnault associate told me. Before the creation of Gucci Group, there were a handful of groups, but they didn’t really compete; LVMH was far and away the leader. Now with the formation of Gucci Group, Arnault had a direct competition for brands, for designers, and for customers. It was a new game, and Bernard Arnault no longer dictated the rules.

T
HE BIGGEST WINNER
of the LVMH–Gucci battle was Prada: with the $
140
million profit its chairman Patrizio Bertelli made from selling his
10
percent share of Gucci to LVMH, he went shopping for luxury brands. In
1999
, Bertelli bought
51
percent of the trendy New York–based ready-to-wear company of Austrian designer Helmut Lang, a stake in the British shoemaker Church & Co., and (after years of wooing) controlling interest in German designer Jil Sander’s highly successful ready-to-wear company. In a mere six months, Bertelli had put together a substantial privately held luxury goods group; combined, the brands did more than $
1
billion in sales turnover annually.

It’s hard to tell from the outside of the Milan-based headquarters that Prada is one of the world’s most successful luxury brands and the cornerstone for an important luxury group. When you arrive at the company compound at Via Bergamo,
21
, you think the cab driver has made a mistake. The street is gray and dreary, a deeply industrial section of a deeply industrial town. (LVMH’s corporate headquarters, by contrast, are now in a sleek new building on the avenue Montaigne, across the street from the posh Hôtel Plaza Athénée.) You enter Prada through an anonymous portal-like oak door—there is no name, no plaque, nothing—and are greeted by a security guard dressed in gray. Everything is gray: the security office, the cobblestone courtyard, the various factory-like buildings surrounding it, and many of the cars parked in it. The only thing that gives the place away is the guard’s uniform: it is not the typical formless security garb but tailored Prada with its stark—some would say neofascist—lines. That, and the clocks behind him showing the time in Milan, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Sydney, and Hong Kong. When I was there in the spring of
2006
, several of them were off by more than a few minutes.

I was taken to a room I had read about often. It is officially Miuccia Prada’s office, and it is as stark and contrived as her designs: poured concrete; a slew of orange and yellow molded plastic Eames chairs; and, sticking up in the center of the floor, a metal tube slide—by artist Carsten Höller—that runs three floors down to the parking lot and is titled
The Slide No.
5
.
Prada has whizzed down it when asked to by reporters.

Prada entered the room as if it were her salon and she had been ushered in by her trusted butler rather than her communications director. This was a woman who had been raised in haute bourgeois society, with servants and grandeur and politesse. Unlike her competitor Donatella Versace, who so obviously came from nothing, Prada’s airs are not airs at all: her snobbery is in her bones. She was wearing a tightly belted full-skirted dress like
1950
s matrons used to wear—think of Lucille Ball in
I Love Lucy
—but made of navy blue silk faille that rustled when she walked, with a light blue Oxford-like shirt underneath. On her feet was a pair of bamboo platform shoes that squeaked as she crossed the painted cement floor and made her teeter like a Chinese woman with bound feet. In her graying chestnut hair, cut sensibly at the shoulder, she had the requisite bourgeois headband, in dark green knit. She didn’t have a stitch of makeup on, not even lipstick, but her brows were well brushed. Her aristocratic profile is the sort that has been rendered in marble by masters, and her sharp nose is well freckled. On her ears were big dangling antique diamond earrings—somebody’s heirloom, if not her own—and just above her left breast a big, gaudy
1950
s-like brooch.

She told one of her attentive assistants to bring her a pot of fennel tea, which she poured delicately like a proper English lady, and reluctantly told me a bit about the roots of her family and her company. Her grandfather Mario Prada came from a family of civil servants. “They must have had money, because they traveled,” she said, and Mario soaked in the luxury lifestyles of Europe’s upper classes. In
1913
, he opened a shop called Fratelli Prada with his brother Martino in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a late-nineteenth-century shopping concourse next to the Duomo with mosaic tile floors and a domed glass roof. With the help of La Scala’s set designer Nicola Benois, Mario decorated the shop like an English aristocrat’s library, with rich woods, brass railings, and leather-bound books. Miuccia Prada told me that, contrary to the oft-recounted tale, Fratelli Prada was not a luggage shop or “travel company,” like Louis Vuitton, but a boutique that specialized in “luxury objects.” Indeed, the door of the Galleria shop still has the original sign, which reads
Oggetti di Lusso
(Objects of Luxury). “He went to Vienna to find the best leather for cases, Poland for crystal for bottles,” she said. “He sold watches and evening bags. He worked with artists as well as artisans.” She showed me images of some of his products: a small lizard handbag with a marcasite-and-lapislazuli buckle from
1918
, a black silk handbag with a hand-carved ivory monkey clasp from
1925
, a toadskin wallet with a silver flower from
1927
, a tortoise and enamel watch from
1938
. “He had very grand ideas,” she said.

Miuccia said she doesn’t know how the shop weathered World War I, but it did, and sometime afterward Martino got out of the business. Mario opened a second shop on the nearby Via Manzoni, not far from La Scala. The company survived World War II, too, though Mario did close the Via Manzoni store then for good. After that, Miuccia became vague about family details. She claimed it was because she’s not interested in the past, which may be somewhat true: the only thing historically referential in her designs is the little enamel triangle label, which is based on her grandfather’s trunk labels. Her reticence could stem in part from her traditional upbringing. But I felt there was also a bit of mystery, something the family—or at least Miuccia—was hiding. When I pressed her on it, she bristled and answered hesitantly, if at all. What she wouldn’t tell me, I discovered from sources close to Prada.

Mario married a woman named Fernanda—Miuccia wouldn’t tell me her name—and they had two daughters, one being Luisa, Miuccia’s mother. (Miuccia wouldn’t tell me her aunt’s name either.) Sometime in the
1940
s, Luisa married a man named Bianchi, “from a wealthy, eccentric family,” Miuccia said. She wouldn’t tell me anything further about him—if he worked, if he supported the family, if he underwrote the company—except to repeat that he was “eccentric.” She wouldn’t even tell me his first name. “My mother would be very upset. She would think I’ve already said too much,” Miuccia explained. His name, I later learned, was Luigi, and everyone called him Gino.

The Bianchis had three children, Alberto, Marina, and Maria—who later became known as Miuccia—and they lived in a four-story, late-nineteenth-century palazzo on the Corso Porta Romana where Miuccia, as well as other family members, still resides today. When I asked then why she was Miuccia Prada, and not Miuccia Bianchi, she said, “My name is Miuccia Bianchi Prada. Some women keep their name. It’s done in Italy.” In fact, according to sources at Prada, Miuccia Prada was officially named Maria Bianchi until the late
1980
s, when she had her elderly unwed maternal aunt adopt her, thereby officially changing her name to Miuccia Prada.

After World War II, Mario Prada lost interest in his business, and it continued on unremarkably until
1958
, when he died and Luisa took it over. The notion of a married, haute bourgeois mother of three working in a shop was unthinkable in Italy at the time. Miuccia explained it this way: two businessmen actually ran the shop and “my mother worked there. It was her little thing on the side.” When I asked Miuccia if she ever helped out—ringing up sales, sending out orders—she looked at me incredulously. “I was a student,” she said in a tone that made it clear that students of her rank did not work, even part-time in the family shop. Miuccia remembers going to the Galleria boutique once or twice in her youth. “It was not a woman’s place,” she said firmly, though it was—at least in theory—her mother’s shop. Her father, Gino, had little if any involvement with the company or the shop. At one point he produced lawn mowers for golf courses.

Her mother’s “little thing” limped along for another twenty years, draining the family’s finances. “We passed from being rich to being just well-off,” Miuccia told an Italian paper. Finally in
1978
, the twenty-eight-year-old Miuccia took over, and she was about as unprepared as one can be. She had a doctorate in political science from the University of Milan and had studied five years with the Piccolo Teatro to be a mime. Her only luxury experience was living it: she was a fashion addict, wearing Yves Saint Laurent, Biba, and André Courrèges. She had moral objections to taking over the business: she was a feminist and a communist, albeit an Yves Saint Laurent–wearing, haute bourgeois feminist communist who had never worked a day in her life. “I loved fashion like mad, but I didn’t like it as an idea,” she told me. But then, she reasoned, the company “wasn’t clothes, so it wasn’t frivolous.” When I asked her why she thought she could run a company without so much as one class in business management or one day of on-the-job experience, she waved off the question like an annoying gnat.

A year into it, she nearly threw in the towel. Then she met Patrizio Bertelli, a leather goods manufacturer from Arezzo, in Tuscany. Fashion legend has it that she caught him at a trade show in Milan in
1978
selling cheap knockoffs of her bags, legally pursued him to stop, then decided to bring him on board to handle her manufacturing instead. I asked her to recount the tale, and she came up with another one altogether. Bertelli—she always calls him Bertelli, never Patrizio—came into the Galleria shop and told her, “Why don’t we work together?” She was taken by his “acute eyes” and said she’d think about it. “Probably had I not met him,” she continued, “I would not have gone on. I couldn’t have bought a factory then. Now I could do it, but then? A woman opening a factory? I didn’t see it as very possible. He had a factory. He was already doing it. He had everything. So I could do the creative side. It took the company immediately to another level.” When I asked about the trade show story, she said tersely, “I knew his company. I met other people, then him. I don’t know if I noticed him there or met him in the store.” The couple’s relationship evolved rapidly from businesslike to romantic. They lived together for eight years, then married in
1987
and had two sons.

What is clear is that Bertelli pushed Miuccia to do things she would have never done otherwise. Within a decade, Miuccia Prada was overseeing the design of shoes and women’s wear, which was often inspired by her bourgeois upbringing and tastes. In the mid-
1990
s, Prada launched Miu Miu, which was a secondary, more youthful line, as well as men’s wear and Prada Sport—all, Miuccia insists, against her will. “Shoes, I didn’t want to do them,” she told me. “Clothes either. I never wanted to do more.” When Miuccia balked, Bertelli responded, “Fine, then we’ll do them without you.” And that, Miuccia says, was “impossible” for her to allow. In retrospect, she is pleased he pushed her. “If I had only done bags I would have been bored,” she says now. “You enlarge your mind, you learn more.”

As Miuccia tells it, she has always struggled to accept what she does for a living. “It’s a very big conflict,” she explained. “I am tempted to say what is luxury: servants and sixteenth-century service. If you want to talk about rare beauty, I know what that is. To fake luxury today is easy. You put some details from the brand’s past, you put a little bit of gold, and that’s it. I can’t bear that…Real luxurious people hate status. You don’t look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It’s all about satisfaction. I think it’s horrible, this judgment based on money. It’s all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn’t bring you anything. It’s so banal.”

At one point, Miuccia was nearly saved from her daily torment: she was asked to run for the Italian parliament, though of course she wouldn’t tell me when or by which party. She chickened out. “I’d have to stop doing my work,” she explained. “Can you imagine a famous designer doing politics?” I was about to mention that the porn star Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina, served in the Italian parliament in the late
1980
s, but I bit my tongue.