Prada credits Bertelli with keeping her focused on the real-world needs of the moment. He has “an incredible eye on what happens in society and so on,” she says. Which is not to say he injects himself into the design process at all; he doesn’t. He does, however, handle the hiring, even when it comes to Prada’s design assistants. “At the end, it’s more or less me” who designs the collections, she explains, adding that she has little patience for the hiring process and that Bertelli has a better radar for talent. Besides, except for a few close relationships—she mentions PR director Verde Visconti—Prada keeps a deliberately cool distance from her staff. “I decided not to care,” she explains. “If you become so aficionado, too affectionate, and they leave, you suffer. Of course, I have a few people in the company that are very near to me. But the others, you know that they come, they want to do a career and they leave, and so you have to learn not to suffer.” Perhaps not surprisingly, then, some former staffers consider the house of Prada not the warmest of workplaces. The designer takes a similarly dispassionate view of the girls who walk her show, considered one of modeling’s plum assignments. For spring, her impossibly high, clunky shoes proved too challenging. At least one girl fell, and numerous others wobbled their way around the winding runway looking terrified. Postshow, Prada sounded more bemused. “I liked it,” she said, smiling, careless of her teen models’ obvious anxiety. “It made the show more interesting.”
Staying interested rates high on Prada’s priority list, including when it comes to getting dressed. Then one of the greatest designers in the world becomes Everywoman, tackling indecision and insecurities. “The more important is the occasion, the [more] last-minute I dress,” Prada says. “It’s important that you feel right, so I use an instinct at the last moment. What I think is unbearable is to wear something that we don’t feel comfortable in. It’s completely, totally psychological. One dress you felt so happy in for that day and that occasion, you put it on in another moment and all the magic is completely disappeared. There is a very tricky [relationship] between the occasion and your mind at that moment.”
One not made easier by an increasingly truncated attention span. When Prada was younger, her initial seasonal wardrobe selections would keep her happy for six months. These days, “after 10 days,” she declares, “I’m fed up.”
That fashion allows its devotees to act on such emotions is a huge part of its allure for Prada. “Since I was very young, I always wanted to be before the trend, the first to do this or to do that,” she says. “I think fashion, in that sense, is the last triumph of what’s new, of what was not done before. That is interesting.”
