Prada held its Spring/Summer 2027 womenswear show at the Fondazione Prada, featuring a futuristic setting with tubular fluorescent lights and translucent benches. The show notes stated that the brand’s co-creative directors, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, focused on the brand’s heritage, finding beauty in familiar forms.
The brand is now applying this logic to its first address in Milan, expanding its historic Galleria boutique into an eight-floor project. The store is located in a prime spot, where tourists often take photos in front of the Prada doors. This location is significant for the brand.
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons emphasize elements of the brand beyond clothing, bringing together retail, hospitality, art, and over a century of company history. The store features a glass dome, an underground passage called the Passaggio Segreto, and an exhibition of lesser-known episodes from Prada’s past. It brings together retail, hospitality, art, and more than a century of company history beneath the glass dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, where the brand founder, Mario Prada, opened Fratelli Prada in 1913.
The Passaggio Segreto connects the Prada Donna and Prada Uomo stores, showcasing early experiments and collaborations. It also includes a café, Marchesi 1824, and a private residence, the Appartamento, which features antique Italian furniture and contemporary photographs. These elements reflect the brand’s history and style. The Appartamento is a reimagining of an eighteenth-century apartment, with photographs chosen by one of Mrs. Prada’s favorite artists, Andreas Gursky.
Upstairs, the Studio provides private shopping and made-to-measure services, while the Osservatorio Fondazione Prada explores photography, technology, and new forms of image-making. The “Pradasphere” on the second floor features a permanent exhibition of clothing, photographs, and artifacts from the Prada archive. This exhibition is a key part of the brand’s new project.
The exhibition traces the company’s evolution from a Milanese leather-goods shop to a brand with interests in art, architecture, cinema, culture, and sport. A version of the exhibit previously traveled to London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, but it now has a permanent home at the address where the Prada story began. The brand’s history is now on display in its hometown, with many artifacts on public view for the first time, gathering clothing, photographs, documents, and other artifacts from the Prada archive.