Miuccia Prada

Miuccia Prada is an Italian fashion designer who is the head designer of Prada. Once a member of the Italian Communist Party and a mime student, Prada was an unlikely entrepreneur when she took over her family's luggage business in 1978. She first dazzled the fashion world in 1985 with a series of black nylon handbags and backpacks. Prada is now a billion-dollar company. Much of what set Prada apart from the rest of the fashion world is her seeming disregard for the fashion industry. Prada has always blazed her own trail and demonstrated a fearlessness in trying new styles. Her experimentation once included a raincoat that was transparent until it became wet, at which point it turned opaque. In 2004, she dazzled a front row of critics at a show with a collection of souvenir clothes that included straw hats and embroidered moccasins. In another designer's hands they might have been seen as garish; in Prada's, the items packed chic appeal. In 2010, Prada was the named the McKim Medal Laureate (for achievements in fashion and business) at the Villa Aurelia of the American Academy in Rome. In 2012, an exhibition of Prada's work was showcased, along with that of the late fashion pioneer Elsa Schiaparelli, at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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