Miuccia Prada Wants To Make Men More Human

This year’s Met gala was a spectacle of look-at-me appearances, with guests arriving on divans, inside chandeliers, and on foot with their own head in their hands. And then there was Frank Ocean, who didn’t so much arrive as show up, looking like the valet, in all-black Prada: nylon anorak, plain trousers, and leather boots. It was an elegant snub to the “camp” theme, totally anti-status—and classic Prada. “Doing fashion with men, I thought that they never wanted to exaggerate,” says Miuccia Prada, who is referred to reverently in fashion circles as Mrs. Prada. “When it’s too much ‘fashion,’ it’s never right.” Her contribution to men’s clothing, she says, has been “to make a little bit of fashion to free them. But not too much.” To wear Prada, Ocean’s look coyly reminded us, is to use your brain to put on clothes: to take an intellectually rigorous approach to getting dressed. If other designers chase must-have garments, Mrs. Prada chases ideas, always hunting for the next big one. We meet in Milan for an interview and photo session in a hangar-like space at the Fondazione Prada, which has recently been covered in a vast, funky palette of tiles for her spring 2020 womenswear show. That show had been only about a week earlier, but, she tells me, “I am already into something different.” After all, she says, “clothes can help to express yourself, but what counts is who you are, and what you think, and how to behave.” Read more at GQ.