No need to ask what would be on the Versace side of said coin – that’ll be the signature Medusa head. Indeed, what we should be talking about when it comes to this most full-throttle of brands is not a mere coin but a medallion, another of its house codes. Donatella, who headed up the label after her brother Gianni’s death in 1997 until March of this year, and who is rumoured to be re-engaging now that Prada is in charge, is the personification of its more is more aesthetic.
Then there’s Miuccia Prada, or Mrs Prada, as she is known in the business. Mrs Prada couldn’t, as that rather formal nomenclature suggests, be more different. A personal style reference point for me, as for so many others, she channels a look that I would characterise as edgy but chic librarian.
If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, well, that’s because this is what Mrs Prada – and her brand – is so brilliant at, and what makes everything she does (and wears) feel so contemporary. There’s even an Instagram account called @miucciafinale which details what she wears at her catwalk shows.
When I interviewed her once she was sporting a button up shirt, vintage diamond and aquamarine chandelier earrings and a brilliantly weird wooden-beaded pencil skirt that presented like one of those oldfangled car seat covers. She looked beyond.
What an alliance. The two most high-profile women in Italian fashion. Though, to be clear, it’s not that Prada will seek to turn Versace into another version of itself. What would be the business point of that? Indeed, one of the posited theories for the sudden departure of the Versace’s recently appointed creative director Dario Vitale after just one highly praised catwalk collection was that his vision aligned too closely with – and thus might potentially have cannibalised – what Prada is currently channelling with great commercial success at its sister brand, Miu Miu.
Ah yes. And where, incidentally, did Vitale work before Versace? Why, Miu Miu. Might Prada also have been punishing the designer’s lack of loyalty in jumping ship before they commandeered his new one for themselves? If true, this would also be more than a little Italian of them. Omertà, and all that.
One of the things I love about visiting Milan, which I am lucky enough to do several times a year, is how you see the city’s distinct fashion personae played out on the streets. There isn’t any other place in the world where you can bear witness to such a diversity of on-brand sartorial identities. Take Paris as a comparison. Chanel and Dior Woman are different, certainly, but not as different as Prada and Versace Woman. In my home city of London, as one more point of reference, we tend to mix up brands to forge something that’s particular to us.
Milan’s greatest fashion chronicler is the American photographer Scott Schuman, who founded his blog The Sartorialist 20 years ago, and now lives in the city. His new book The Sartoralist: Milano (£60, Taschen) brings together the best of his work, and the best of Milanese wardrobes, from the old lady in head-to-toe leopard print [page 36] to the cat in a gold Prada collar [page 13].
Many of the city’s style luminaries feature on its pages (including Mrs Prada herself) but it’s the anonymous – and often gloriously garbed – fashion-plates-come-to-life which enchant me the most, just as they do when I visit. Who is that 60-something woman in the wraparound gold shades? And who is that cyclist brave enough (or foolish enough) to sally forth in baby-blue stilettos and a polka-dot mini skirt?
There is a playfulness to Milanese fashion, in its love of print and ornamentation especially, and there is also an agelessness. More than any other city I know it’s where you see older women – and even more notably, men – embracing Style with a capital S.
Tailoring isn’t dead here, to wit Lapo Elkaan in a sand suit giving George Clooney a run for his money. But experimentation is alive and kicking too. See-through plastic raincoat plus silver platform sandals anyone? Not girls in pearls, but boys?
Milan is small, as Schuman points out, just 1.4 million inhabitants, which means “its sheer density of fashion alone makes it the most stylish city in the world”. I have always been struck by the degree to which it feels both parochial and international at the same time. In this it reminds me of two other one-horse towns, Washington and Los Angeles.
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Schuman calls Milan “the Hollywood of style. It seems everyone in the city is only a link or two away from someone in the style-based business.” And everyone is only a step or two away from someone looking incredible.