Miuccia Prada, fashion designer defying the luxury gloom

As a schoolgirl activist in 1970s Milan, Miuccia Prada once recalled hemstitching her skirts on the stairs outside her family home in between leftwing protests.

Known simply as Miu to her relatives, the designer — who has spent almost half a century building Prada from the leather company founded by her grandfather into a global luxury powerhouse, is known for her progressive views and unorthodox aesthetic.

Now Miu Miu, the brand she launched in 1992 inspired by those same values, is defying a downturn in the luxury sector with spectacular sales. La signora Prada, as she is known in the industry, deserves all the credit, industry insiders say.

Miu Miu recorded a 105 per cent jump in sales in the three months to September 30, pushing like-for-like sales at its Milan-based parent up 18 per cent on a year earlier. Net revenues at Prada Group, which is listed in Hong Kong, were up 18 per cent to €3.8bn in the first nine months of the year compared with the same period in 2023.

Their results came as competitors such as Gucci recorded falling sales, prompting its French owner Kering to issue several profit warnings this year. Prada’s share price has risen almost 30 per cent this year. While it is not alone in bucking the broader luxury trend — Hermès is up about 15 per cent — LVMH and Kering have fallen about 15 per cent and 43 per cent respectively.

Andrea Guerra, who took over from Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli as Prada Group chief executive at the start of 2023, told analysts last month that Miu Miu’s growth was attributable to its “strong point of view”.

Hiring Raf Simons as her co-creative director for the main Prada brand has freed Miuccia Prada to focus on designing Miu Miu’s fashion lines, according to Prada insiders. Miu Miu has since shifted from a label aimed at younger consumers to one for “those who are young in spirit”, they add.

The line’s irreverent designs include sequinned knickers that sell for as much as €4,000, embroidered bralettes and an “absurdly” short miniskirt that Nicole Kidman wore on the cover of Vanity Fair two years ago, sparking a debate on age-appropriate dressing. They have paid off at a time when rival labels’ traditional designs struggle to enthuse customers.

Daria Nasledysheva, an analyst at Bank of America, said: “Miu Miu has driven fashion content and newness through product at a time when other luxury brands continued to stick to understated luxury, thus managing to successfully re-engage the consumer across different price-points.”

“The avant-garde nature of the looks and the sense of experimentation and risk-taking really sets Miu Miu apart,” she added.

Former Miu Miu chief executive Benedetta Petruzzo, who was poached at the end of the summer by LVMH-owned Dior, told the Financial Times last year that Miuccia Prada was “not just the creative director” of the brand, “she’s the soul . . . Miu Miu is Miuccia Prada; it’s the space where she can be entirely herself”.

Once considered akin to a little sister to the main Prada brand, Miu Miu has now topped ecommerce site Lyst’s closely watched ranking of the most in-demand fashion brands for two consecutive years. It targets a far more diverse group of consumers at a much higher price-point than a decade ago.

Prada herself is known for her particular tastes — she once declared “ugly is attractive” and was unafraid to have supermodels Kate Moss and Amber Valletta walk the catwalk in unflattering silhouettes in a 1996 show entitled “Banal eccentricity”. But Miu Miu “is an entirely different story to her”, colleagues say.

However, analysts do not expect Miu Miu to overcome Prada in size. “Whilst growth rates are definitely superior to those of Prada, this is off of a much smaller base,” said BofA’s Nasledysheva.

Crucially, Miu Miu is doing well in China, a market that has recently become challenging for many European luxury groups after years of breakneck growth. Group sales grew 9 per cent in the first nine months of the year in Asia-Pacific excluding Japan. Meanwhile, strong growth in Japan was also fuelled by visiting Chinese tourists, analysts said.

Guerra has sounded a note of caution, describing market conditions in the region as “challenging”.

But in the meantime consumers are continuing to support Prada with its provocative designs and a push on accessories, including hit ballet flats and a fresh take on Miu Miu’s traditional matelassé leather handbags, proving popular with Chinese customers.

The brand has also doubled down on its social media spending in China in the past couple of years, using popular domestic social media platforms such as Little Red Book to sell its products including via live streaming events.

One insider said that although Prada and Bertelli, who is now the group’s chair, generally had a “distaste” for social media platforms, the digital strategy adopted in China showed how they were “clever enough to maximise their social media presence in the best possible way”. Prada does not have any social media presence herself.

Last year Prada opted to feature octogenarian Chinese actress Wu Yanshu among a group of Gen Z celebrities in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales short film series. In March, Chinese doctor Qin Huilan, 70, was invited to walk Miu Miu’s catwalk in Paris after posting snaps of herself in the brand’s outfits on her Instagram page. Both events went viral globally.

In the newly released biography Prada by Tommaso Ebhardt, graphic designer Michael Rock is quoted thus: “It is as if Ms Prada were telling her clients: ‘I know that you know that I know about all the contradictions we experience, I experience them too, I feel them too’.”