Article on Miuccia Prada: Moreover hot, hot, hot

A SHOW was held recently in the Prada Group's headquarters in Milan. Nothing noteworthy in that; shows are held here every year in the ready-to-wear season. But this was different. For a start, you entered the show space not from the front, but from the back. Then the room that houses hair-andmake-up became a long corridor of marble statues with missing limbs. And the area which usually holds the runway welcomed instead an enormous tank with too roses, cacti, sunflowers and artichokes, all frozen in neon-bright hallucinatory glory by 25 tonnes of liquid silicon... Indeed, those present were not at a fashion show at all but an art show... the latest in a series of twice-yearly exhibits held by the Fondazione Prada, a private organisation set up in 1993 by Miuccia Prada, the fashion group's chief designer, and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, Prada's chief executive, to bring contemporary art to Italy. Though nominally unrelated to the fashion side of the business, the Fondazione is actually just one more example of the way Prada leads the fashion pack; these days, its philanthropy is copied as often as its clothes. For fashion has discovered art, or rather fashion has discovered art patronage... Of course, this cross-pollination of fashion and art is not new... Designers are famous for wanting to be considered "serious" artists, and what better way to achieve that than through respect-by-association? Ms Prada and Mr Bertelli have an impressive private collection of works by Frank Stella, Yves Klein, and Gerhard Richter. Reportedly Ms Prada is prouder of her recent award from the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Manhattan than of any accolades she has received from the fashion press...

Anonymous. The Economist. London: May 20, 2000. Vol. 355, Iss. 8171; pg. 103, 1 pgs