Prada in the Nineties

A fascinating look at fashion label Prada in its most iconic and foundational decade – the nineties.

Nylon backpacks, ugly chic, celebrities, 'intellectual fashion' – welcome to Prada in the Nineties, the decade when the Italian label redefined fashion. This fully illustrated guide examines the Italian fashion label in its transformative era, looking at the collections, the advertising, the impact and the story of the label.

Whether you are a fashion devotee, or you simply know Prada as what the devil wears, the label has transcended beyond high fashion, and become part of contemporary culture, as people track down its clothes on resale websites and obsessively discuss new collections. And while Prada is not the only designer label that has achieved this feat, it may be the only one to have done so while making clothes that are often described as 'intellectual'.

Taking the leather-goods company founded by her grandfather in 1913, and turning it into one of the biggest fashion companies in the world, Miuccia Prada has achieved an outstanding feat, having only launched her first womenswear collection in 1988. And in the nineties, she would come to hit an unprecedented stride, with clothes that captured precisely the zeitgeist; that went against all other trends, bucked the norms of good taste, of beauty, of propriety, but also elevated a new kind of womanhood and a new kind of femininity that could live in tension with itself, that could be – and was – filled with contradictions. Indeed, one Prada dress, worn by Uma Thurman at the 1995 Academy Awards, is so famous it has its own Wikipedia page. 

Written by Harper's Bazaar journalist and Prada obsessive Laia Garcia-Furtado, and illustrated by fashion stylist and artist Rachel Song, Prada in the Nineties is the story of this decade, this label, and the must-have for the fashion fan in your life.

This is the first in a series, with the next titles being Versace in the Eighties and Schiaparelli in the Thirties. 

Word count: 40,000