She Wrote the Book on Prada

Today Prada is a world-conquering fashion megacorporation, but there was a time when you could call the Italian label “quaint” with a straight face.

Laia Garcia-Furtado, the deputy culture director of Harper’s Bazaar, zooms back to that period in her new book, “Prada in the Nineties.” Contained between its clinical pea-green covers — a crucial hue in the brand’s ugly-chic palette — the book romps through Prada’s pre-Y2K puberty, as it molted into the brand we now know.

The story begins in 1988, when Miuccia Prada introduced the first women’s collection at her family’s then nearly 80-year-old luggage label. As Garcia-Furtado recounts, Prada grew more confident as the ’90s clicked on, finding the futuristically frumpy look that would define the brand.

With illustrations by Rachel Song, the book plunges into each of the 20 Prada collections from that decade. Along the way, Garcia-Furtado tells a larger story about a shifting fashion industry and its collisions with culture: There are asides about Nirvana, the British designer Mary Quant, the Antwerp Six and a 16-year-old Kate Moss getting discovered as a model.

She dredges up early reviews that dismissed Prada’s clothes as a “smart little sack,” revisits the time Uma Thurman wore the brand to the 1995 Academy Awards and takes us back to Prada winning designer of the year at the VH1 Fashion Awards — back when VH1 still had such a thing.

Garcia-Furtado’s book, which was not authorized or approved by Prada, is a reminder that every label starts somewhere. I chatted with her about her favorite collection from this period and what critics made of Prada then.

What do you see as the big story line for, well, Prada in the ’90s?

When you think of Prada in the ’90s, you think of all of the iconic collections that sort of started in ’96, and then you have to deal with — not deal with, but look at those early ’90s collections that perhaps weren’t as exciting. This is really the story of how this woman built this from the ground up. At the beginning, it really is very independent designer, fledgling label vibes, despite the fact that she had the money from a heritage label.

You were a Prada obsessive going into this, but what was new to you?

What I learned is that hemlines were still a really big deal in the ’90s. That was sort of crazy. People were like, “Oh, my God, the hemlines are short, the hemlines are long.” There was still a high level of respectability politics or whatever in fashion.

But about Miuccia specifically, there was a quote where she said something like, “Real life had always been OK to be portrayed in films and in art, etc., but it was sort of never allowed in fashion.” That’s what she was trying to bring in, and that’s why things could be ugly. And so this is basically the decade where the ground was laid for everything that Prada became. At the beginning of the decade, she’s fledgling. People are like, Oh, this little label in Milan. Then, by the end, everyone is copying her designs or her ideas.

So you say ’96 was the collection to you that changed everything?

Yeah, the ugly-chic collection, which is what it’s called now. That’s when she abandoned all the aesthetics from before. That collection is when she was like, Actually, no, I’m going to go totally my way. I’m going to do something completely different from what everyone is expecting. And then she just kept it up.

When you look back at reviews of those collections, did it take time for people to catch on to what she was doing?

It took time for people to even give her reviews. A lot of the early ones are like, “Prada also showed a collection.” You don’t get a lot about it. But people reacted strongly when she wildly changed directions. The ’99 collection — I think it was Suzy Menkes who was like, These are some of the ugliest shoes I’ve ever seen in my life. (Editor’s note: Menkes actually described the shoes as “some of the most hideous and deforming footwear in the long annals of female suffering.”) It was a real shock to people.

It is Ralph, though

In 1981, Ralph Lauren won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s inaugural award for men’s wear designer of the year. He won that same award again last night. Lauren has now won more C.F.D.A. accolades than anyone (including one last year for women’s wear designer of the year.) It’s a reflection of Lauren’s unrivaled staying power — and how stuck the American design scene can feel.

There are new(ish) names climbing up that scene all the time, like Colleen Allen, who won emerging designer of the year last night. She has found a lane with her intuitive coats and to-the-floor skirts in velvet and fleecy wool, sometimes worn by celebrities like Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. (I like to think of the sensibility as Victorian gorpcore.)

Credit as well to the C.F.D.A. for recognizing Susan Cianciolo with the Isabel Toledo board of directors’ tribute. Cianciolo has charted her own course through the industry with comely, cobbled clothes that tilt toward art. She has also acted as a mentor for a generation of designers including Giovanna Flores and the women behind SC103, whom I profiled last week.

And finally, Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent was named international designer of the year. But wait — didn’t Saint Laurent just announce his departure? It did. The timing was odd. He was given the award by Zoë Kravitz, Rosé and Hailey Bieber, all wearing gilded ensembles from Vaccarello’s last show. Apt, as celebs were always Vaccarello’s truest demographic.

Other things worth knowing about:

My anecdotal, eyeballed assessment from Halloween in my South Brooklyn neighborhood: I didn’t see a single KPop Demon Hunter, which was the costume last year. I couldn’t turn my head and not see a Spiderman, though. The classics prevail.
Watching the New York City Marathon the next day, I was struck by how many people clipped past in the Nike ACG “Airflow” top, with its cheese-cloth-like weave. The idea really has set in that for your shirt to breath, it requires literal holes. (More looks from Marathon Sunday.)
“Club Kid,” Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut about a washed-up nightlife promoter who learns he has a 10-year-old son, is out on Friday. It’s amusing, it’s moving, it made me wish I’d gone out more in my 20s.
Four years ago, Balenciaga, then helmed by Demna, walked into a media firestorm when it released a holiday campaign showing children with teddy bears in bondage. Yet this year’s holiday ad from Gucci, where Demna now works, is as sanitized as can be. Starring Mariah Carey, Queen Christmas, the ad is all toothy smiles and placid Yuletide signifiers. It could be a Macy’s ad.
Zohran Mamdani, like so many 35-year-old men before him, now has a mustache. (It’s for Movember.)

What we’re reading:

This brilliant investigation by the data scientist Laura Leek into why our cities are all starting to feel the same has changed how I look at the world. Read The Times’s interview with Leek, as well.
Guy Trebay remembers Patrick Stewart, hairless wonder.
A survey of jambon-beurre in New York. Just last week, a member of the Fashions team ate an excellent iteration of this deceptively simple Parisian sandwich at the Brooklyn wine bar Rude Mouth.
And we leave with you with a zippy rundown of what The Times had to say about Prada back in the ’90s. From 1994: “The tidy efficiency of the clothes, though, did suggest a laboratory or a clinical spa like the one in Federico Fellini’s ‘8½.’” From 1996: “It is difficult to imagine fashion’s elite succumbing to the prints and colors Ms. Prada has invented so beautifully, precisely because the look is more distinctive than wearing the company’s billboard would be.” From 1999: “And unlike many previous collections when Prada seemed to celebrate the awkward and the ugly, the swingy pleated skirts, graceful blouses and shapely knitwear were clothes for women at peace with their gender and comfortable with their sexuality.”