Download the PDF Miuccia Prada has a doctorate in political science. She calls herself a feminist. "I make clothes. It's silly. But it's my job."Last month, ten days before Miuccia Prada was scheduled to present her collection of women's clothing for the 2004 fall season in Milan, she began, in her own words, to "freak out." The day before, she had been relaxed, amiable, and entertaining. She had even dressed with her customary eccentricity: lime-green skirt, mauve cashmere cardigan, short black socks, and a pair of fringed brown wingtips so cumbersome that they seemed like something only a nun or a golfer would wear. Or Miuccia Prada. By the time she got to her office the next morning, her mood had shifted. It was Valentine's Day—and her seventeenth wedding anniversary, as a matter of fact—but there were no roses, chocolates, or champagne in sight, just bottled water, a plate of sliced oranges, and a lot of coffee. Her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, the demanding and theatrical Tuscan who is the chief executive of the global group of companies that bears the Prada family name, had left early on his Lear jet to attend to the production of shoes at one of their factories near Florence. I asked if she was sorry that she would have to spend their anniversary without him. "Are you kidding?" she replied. "Thank God he is gone. Because he would have ideas. And, right now, if he told me what he thought I would kill him."

Prada was struggling, as she often does, to balance the commercial requirements of a giant international corporation with her idiosyncratic aesthetic goals. "I want to rule the world," she told me once, not completely in jest. "I want the name Prada to be huge. But also I want to make what I want to make and what I want to wear." It is almost impossible to be both avant-garde and immensely successful, and Prada knows that; but she insists on trying. "We are completely stuck," she said at one point in the afternoon. "Nothing is working out. Not the shapes of the collars or the silhouettes or the fabrics or the colors. Nothing. They don't even look like clothes. In my head, I have a very clear idea of what I want, but my ideas don't seem to match with reality and I don't know what to do." Nearly every season since 1988, when she introduced her first line of women's clothing, Prada has shown an astonishing ability to create trends: it began with a black bag made of industrial nylon and trimmed in leather—a simple purse that acquired a cult following and, eventually, helped launch a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Since then, she has brought out military clothes that set off a trend for utilitarian chic; slingback Sabrina heels that caused one sensation and oversized wedges that caused another; and, in 2000, an updated, deeply coveted thousand-dollar version of a bowling bag. In each case, she managed to convert a private obsession with things like kitsch, uniforms, and wallpaper into an international symbol of cool.

This year, Prada was inspired by computers and by the idea of "exploring the boundary of what is real and what is virtual"—an increasingly serious pursuit for her. She had spent hours peering at video games, examining how the characters were dressed and how they moved; then she used prints and photographs to blur the distinctions between them. But she still had to turn it all into clothes. "They need to be fashionable"—a word she hates—"and commercial, too," she said. "This is where I really suffer. Because there are three basic questions I have to ask myself: Do I like the clothes? Will they sell? And are they new? They are very different questions, and I can almost never seem to match them up. Look at the coat I was just working on"—a tartan trenchcoat cut from green, orange, and purple wool and trimmed in fur. "From a selling point, I know perfectly well what people will want. If I try to turn this into something that is possibly nice to wear, it will come out banal. Because usually what's nice to wear is banal. And this is my problem. Do I make the clothing people want or the clothing I think they ought to wear?"

All day, she had been in her workroom, on the top floor of the Prada headquarters, on Via Bergamo. A harsh sun cut through the wall of windows, and after three frustrating hours she took a break and walked next door to her office, which—like the rest of the building—is crafted from the school of icy Nordic modernism: no chintz sofas or inviting fireplaces, just polished cement and exposed plumbing. Dozens of books were piled neatly on a black table, and rows of ceramics sat on a windowsill. The walls, painted an industrial ochre, were empty, the floor an unbroken expanse of concrete. The wastepaper basket—also with nothing in it—was black; so were the tables and chairs. There are no family snapshots (she has two teen-age sons)—in fact, no personal touches at all. A work of art by Carsten Holler protruded from the middle of the floor. At first glance, it looks like a horrendous construction error, or a particularly wide trash chute placed in the most inconvenient location possible; actually, it's a slide that snakes along the building's three floors and empties into a courtyard outside. There are safety pads on the floor for anyone who is willing to give it a try.

Prada had been carrying on an endless discussion of pleats (yes or no, how big, where will they fall), faille, and the possibilities of computer-generated design. Her design director, Fabio Zambernardi, was by her side, as he has been for more than fifteen years. (Before that, he worked as a jeweller, then attended dental school.) As she talked, Zambernardi drew. Shoes, collars, dresses. The height of a waist, the length of a skirt. They debated the heft of a cashmere-wool blend that she wanted to use in a dress. "I like heavy fabrics," she said to me at one point. "Fabio is against." She wanted a long, low arch to a high-heeled pump; he wanted it sharper and higher. It went on like that all day. At one point, she was informed that the factory would not deliver clothes for three more days. "Why?" she asked plaintively, and instructed an assistant to phone a foreman. No answer. "My God, where are they?" she muttered. "It's ten days before a show and they aren't working?" She turned back to staring dolefully at textiles printed in what seemed like psychedelic versions of television-test patterns. After a while, she looked up and whispered, "You know what? This time, I think we could really have something like a complete, total disaster."

She saw me roll my eyes. "I have a kind of complex of this work being superficial and dumb," she said. "It's my personal drama. Not the world's. Everyone who is smart says they hate fashion, that it's such a waste of time. I have asked many super-serious people, 'Then why is fashion so popular?' Nobody can answer that question. But somebody must be interested, because when I go to the stores the people are there. Thousands of them. So I have grown tired of apologizing for being in this profession." She went on, "I know that clothes are not important, that I am not changing society. I am just doing my work as well as I can. And right now I want this collection to succeed. So today I am having a crisis. And why? Because I can't match a dress with a pair of shoes. I am embarrassed to say that. But in the end I cannot forget what I do. I make clothes. It's silly. But it's my job."

Miuccia Prada doesn't sew, embroider, or knit. I never saw her sketch a skirt or a shoe, nor is she likely to pick up a pair of scissors and cut out a dress. She is famous, perhaps above all, for her stylish and expensive footwear—which is as much in demand in Tokyo as in Manhattan or Moscow. Several years ago, the company constructed a factory near Florence so modern that it looks like a greenhouse, yet not once since then has she visited the workrooms there. She is not that kind of designer. Instead, she surrounds herself with talented people whose job is to translate her themes, concepts, and—especially—her taste into clothes that bear the Prada name. Often, she will focus on a color, a texture, a memory; in the mid-nineties, for example, it was trash. ("I was obsessed by trash, that trashy seventies feeling. Bad taste—I loved it.") Once she locks in her seasonal passion, she can tell her people what to do and show them how to do it.

It is an unusual approach, but it has made her one of the most influential designers in the world, and one of the most powerful women in Europe. If Giorgio Armani is Milan's Volkswagen, then Miuccia Prada is its Mercedes. She makes clothes for rich people, but she has turned an alternative aesthetic—slightly frumpy, somewhat feminist—into an international business that now owns controlling interests in the companies of such high-end designers as Azzedine Alaia, Jil Sander, and Helmut Lang, among others. It's not easy to take a thrift-store sensibility and marry it to a five-thousand-dollar snakeskin trenchcoat. But anyone who has wandered into one of Prada's hundred and sixty-five stores—the walls painted identically, in minty shades of green—would have to acknowledge that she has changed the way that many people think about clothes. "The name 'Prada' has come to represent a new way of expressing style," Lawrence Steele, a Milan-based designer who was one of her earliest assistants, told me. "Is it ugly? Is it retro? Is it incredibly cool? Nobody really knows, but everyone is afraid to be wrong. Miuccia's clothes are certainly not for everyone. It's like a radio wave. You have to be able to tune into that frequency. But if you get what she is doing, then you want to buy them. Because nobody else is making anything like that."

Prada is not after women's bodies; what she wants is their brains. She doesn't make clothes that are aggressively vulgar, like Donatella Versace, or staid, repetitive classics, like Armani. Nor does she make anything particularly revealing, like John Galliano or Tom Ford. Her clothes can be odd and, she concedes, at times even purposefully ugly. She once said about beauty that "when the clothes do not reveal, it gives you the freedom to reveal your mind." Recently, she told me, "I don't want my women to look like a caricature. Simple as that. They say my clothes have to be sexy. Yes, I suppose. But for me the goal is to be sexy in a different way, and that is not so easy. To be honest, what interests me more and more is the idea of what is real and what is unreal. What is beauty and what is fake? I'm wondering if we even can tell anymore."

Prada herself is a handsome and engaging woman of fifty-three; she is striking, but not beautiful in a conventional way. Though she makes clothes that many people feel can be worn only by the absurdly thin, she herself is not—at least, not the type of thin that is required to wear one of her tight chiffon skirts or restrictively cut sweater sets. She has auburn hair that hangs to her shoulders, and greenish-brown eyes that glisten when she smiles. She has often been described as dowdy, but it's a sexy dowdiness, one she has managed to bottle and brand. More than anything else, whether she is dressed in a plain gray suit with enormous antique diamonds dangling from her ears, or a tie-dyed cotton dress, a man's sweater, a neck full of costume jewelry, and astonishingly expensive purple crocodile shoes, Prada has her own style, and she doesn't understand women who don't. "What all these actresses wear to the Academy Awards now—it's just dresses," she told me one evening. "They have no personality. You rarely see them think about it. It's as if women were afraid to explore who they are anymore. Now, how can that be sexy? Watch them. Look at Nicole Kidman. She is beautiful, and she is nice. But sexy?" Prada shook her head sadly. "A zero." She herself has turned a search for a different kind of glamour into a fetish. That's what her February show was about. It is also behind her new advertising campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel, which features a series of waxy-looking models staring vacantly at the camera: they might be real—or they might belong in Madame Tussaud's. Who can tell?

Prada has always been in love with clothes, but it never occurred to her that she should make them for a living. Her paternal grandfather, Mario, opened a leather-goods store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, in Milan, in 1913, and within five years he had been appointed by the Italian royal family to make valises, trunks, and cases from leather, walrus, alligator, and other exotic materials. That first shop is now the main Prada store—and a regal reminder of the family's heritage of craftsmanship. The most beautiful items there—ivory-handled walking sticks, tortoiseshell brushes, beauty cases made from elephant skin—are not even for sale. Although her grandfather's greatest days as a merchant were over by the Second World War, Miuccia has been exposed to luxury as a way of life since the day she was born. ("Even now, my mother will grab a dress I make and rub it and say, 'This silk is horrible. It's nothing your grandfather would even have been willing to sell. Can't you do better than this?' ")

Prada says that her childhood was dull. Her parents were typically severe, and she was severely bored. By the age of fifteen, she, like so many middle-class kids in the sixties, had begun to rebel. "I was always frustrated, because I had to dress so seriously. I was a proper young girl and I was dreaming of pink shoes, red shoes, pink dresses. Anything with color. Exciting underwear. Everybody had this kind of dull underwear and wore boring striped dresses. I couldn't stand it." She began to dress in an eccentric—even bizarre—manner. "I would wear Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, and then some strange English clothes, all in a weird way. I always had to be first. That was the most important thing. I also loved uniforms, and I still do. You can hide yourself in a uniform; you can conceal who you are. Sometimes I like to hide myself behind formality. I think it's attractive."

She enrolled at the University of Milan, and eventually received a doctorate in political science. Much has been made of the fact that she joined the Communist Party, but in the sixties it was almost a rite of passage for thousands of young middle-class Italians. At protests, she would turn up looking a little different from the other revolutionaries, however: she refused to wear jeans, preferring high heels and vintage dresses, which she found in thrift shops. "I hated the bourgeois people who felt they had to dress in jeans when you knew they didn't want to," she said. I asked her if jeans had ever been a staple of her wardrobe. She answered, "I owned one pair, once, in the eighties, by Fiorucci." After she got her Ph.D., she took an unexpected turn: she began training to become a mime at Milan's Piccolo Teatro. "In those years, you had to do everything kind of strange," she recalled. She was a shy young woman, and it was the perfect profession—providing a guaranteed excuse for her silence. "A friend of mine had a sister who did it, so I went to the theatre and I loved it. I was there for five or six years. I got very serious, and I was a really good mime—especially when it was abstract. It's fun controlling your body. I was curious of so many things." Her career ended abruptly when her parents finally forbade her to continue. She was obstinate, but still a good Catholic girl who was not about to break with her family over a life in the theatre.

Feminism became Prada's next fixation, and even today her ambivalence about the role women play in society is obvious. She always felt that a career in fashion would be demeaning. (Elaine Showalter, a professor emeritus of English at Princeton who has written prominently on fashion history, points out that it is a common view among feminists and intellectual women. "They are all leery of the whole fashion world and scared of being associated with it," she says. "It's supposedly frivolous, it's vain, it's focussed on the externals rather than the internals. For many women, it's hard to get beyond that feeling of guilt at doing something they enjoy so much.") By the early nineteen-seventies, though, Prada needed money, so she went to work where she could find a job—in the family store. "I never liked my work in theory, but I loved it in practice," she told me. "And still I am not one hundred per cent happy, and probably the reason I do all these other things is that I want to escape the cruelty and banality of what I do. But I like it, too. I have to say that. I really do love my work."

One day in 1978, at a trade fair in Milan, Prada met Bertelli. He owned a leather factory in Tuscany, and was producing what she considered to be cheap knockoffs of her bags. He was belligerent, endlessly argumentative, and as arrogant as any man she had ever met. They hit it off immediately. "He had all these ideas about what I should do with my business," she said, laughing. (By this time, her mother had persuaded her to take over the store.) He told her that she should have greater ambitions. She had her doubts, but gave him the exclusive license to manufacture Prada leather goods. In 1987, after living together for eight years, they were married. "He has been pushing me ever since," she said, not unhappily. "I wanted at first to do only bags. But the company—and by that I mean my husband—insisted I make shoes. And when I said no he would say, 'O.K., we will do it without you.' And I don't like that, so I had to do it myself. That became the system. He will say, 'It's time to start a men's line,' and I will say no. He would go get somebody else to do it, and I couldn't stand that, so I would take over." In 1993, she launched her secondary line, Miu Miu (it's her nickname). With Miu Miu, Prada allows herself to be more experimental, even whimsical. The same year, she began to sell men's clothes. In 1997, she introduced a line of sportswear. "I am egotistical, so in the end he knows I will do the work," she said. "If I could, I would make every single piece myself. Bertelli was right. I would have been bored only doing bags."

When Prada and Bertelli latch on to a subject, they don't dabble. Their art collection—with works by Brice Marden, Damien Hirst, Walter De Maria, and many others—is considered among the most important contemporary collections in Italy. Bertelli tends toward the modern classics, like Stella and Rothko, and his office, near Arezzo, is filled with recent work by Italian artists. It was Prada who bought a large metal escape vehicle created by the American installation artist Andrea Zittel. (It sits prominently in her living room and looks quaintly futuristic, like something George Jetson might have driven to work.) Ten years ago, neither of them knew much about modern art. "Art for me was school education—nothing major," Prada said. "But we had a huge immersion. Meeting artists, reading and studying. It went on for three or four years—I can't remember how long—until we felt we understood something." It also led, in 1995, to the establishment of the Fondazione Prada, an exhibition space in Milan that houses a growing collection of contemporary art. "Again, it happened by chance. We had some friends who were artists. And one said, 'Ah, this is a fantastic space for sculpture.' And I said that would be a good idea, and my husband said, 'Fine, let's do it.' He is much more concrete than I am, so it was done." Since then, the foundation's director, Germano Celant, an art critic who also serves as senior curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim in New York, has put on a series of shows by artists ranging from the British sculptor Marc Quinn to Dan Flavin and Anish Kapoor. Prada insists that her love of contemporary art is personal and has nothing to do with her day job. "I laugh when they talk about fashion as art," she says. "It's ridiculous. When I buy art, I want to keep it separate. You don't want people to think you are doing what you are doing because you want to make your company better."

It is hard to know, however, where personal obsessions end and the desire to sell the world an increasing percentage of its luxury goods begins. Like Ralph Lauren, Prada offers far more than clothes; she is trying to sell people a better, hipper version of themselves. She doesn't simply sell five-hundred-dollar scarves (or thirty-eight-thousand-dollar chinchilla blankets); she sells the world view that comes with buying such objects. Bertelli and Prada love art and collect it for the pleasure it gives them; but their life style fuels the image of cultivated luxury that they retail to more than sixty countries. Bertelli is also an avid sailor. In 2000, after he invested more than fifty million dollars, his boat, the Luna Rossa, reached the finals of the America's Cup. Since then, the Luna Rossa and its pursuits have captured the imagination of Italy (but not that of Bertelli's wife, who shakes her head in mock mourning when the subject is mentioned). It has also, of course, pushed the Prada name (and its red striped sport logo) to places in the world where it had hardly been uttered before.

The couple's latest, and perhaps most significant, enthusiasm is for architecture. In the last few years, Prada and Bertelli have spent more than a hundred and twenty million dollars on two major stores, in New York and Tokyo—they refer to them as "epicenters." The New York store, on lower Broadway, in SoHo, was designed by the controversial Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. The one in Tokyo was designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. It cost about eighty million dollars to build, which represents the single largest investment that Italy has made in Japan since the Second World War, and has become one of Japan's most provocative public spaces.

Prada and Bertelli don't see these epicenters merely as stores; they prefer to describe them as attempts to place shopping in a modern cultural context. Depending on your point of view, it's either a visionary assessment or pretentious. Bertelli considers shopping—he prefers the word "consumerism"—a sort of religion for many people in the age of globalism, a defining cultural activity. "It's a new language, a new form of society, a way of communicating that is now central to human life in many places," Bertelli says. Koolhaas doesn't go quite that far. "Shopping used to be an autonomous entity with its own metabolism," he says. "But over the past twenty years it has infiltrated almost every other activity known to man. Airports, churches, universities—it has become impossible to disentangle and separate the fate of these entities from shopping. They support each other, and you don't know where one ends and the other begins."

That is certainly true in the vast space of the New York store. It would be hard not to regard the twenty-two-thousand-square-foot building as at least something of a monument to the Prada empire. After all, it has an area called the "aura," with a series of screens known as the "ubiquitous display" (at the moment, it is showing loops of scenes from a shopping mall in China). Metal cages, which the staff refers to as "the hanging city," hold merchandise. There are also magic mirrors, dressing-room doors that become opaque on demand, and radio-frequency identification tags, so that the history of any article of clothing can be traced, then viewed by the customer on a dressing-room monitor. I asked Prada how one is to regard such a space, which, despite all the talk of artistic community, exists principally to sell clothes. She acknowledged that it would be stupid to pretend that egos weren't attached to an undertaking so ambitious. "But we had such important spaces that we felt we had to use them," she told me. "Also, we were a little fed up with our stores. I was bored. One evening, we sat down to decide who should do it. And Bertelli"—she almost never calls him anything else—"said, 'Let's take out the books, and perhaps we will see something that looks exciting.' I picked out the work of Koolhaas. I didn't know him. Or his work. Everyone was suggesting somebody, and nobody suggested him. They said, 'Ah, no, forget it, he is too difficult.' But immediately when somebody is difficult for us it's exciting. So Bertelli said, 'Let's invite him.' And it's been a wonderful collaboration." This summer, another epicenter designed by Koolhaas will open in Los Angeles—at nearly twenty thousand square feet—and they have been discussing a fourth, in Beijing or Shanghai, which would focus on preservation. "You go to Shanghai now, and there are the grand hotels, and there are skyscrapers, and every company is like every other company," Prada said. "It's offensive and painful, and doing a project that is more respectful is one of my goals." In addition, Bertelli told me, China is the next great luxury market and the best possible place to expand their business.

Is all this development art, commerce, or something in between? "Miuccia is trying to keep up with the zeitgeist," Germano Celant told me. "The danger for her in fashion is that if she is too experimental she will lose her clients. With art, she can try new things. But in the end it all fits together: art, fashion, architecture, design—even shopping. It's all theatre, really. A modern spectacle for a modern world."

One particularly cold night a couple of weeks ago, Prada invited me to her apartment for dinner. She lives with her husband and their two sons across from an auto dealership in central Milan, on the ground floor of the building where she was born and raised. Her mother, who is eighty-five, lives upstairs. Her brother and various nieces and nephews occupy apartments in the building, too. Prada tries to separate her work from her private life, and is usually successful; she rarely goes out and spends most nights at home. "I raised two children," she told me. "For fifteen years, that is what I did at night and every free moment. I never travelled. I never went out. Yes, I had it easy—I could switch my work hours around and get help. I could go back home during the work day if I wanted, but definitely I gave up the fun for the children. I don't regret that for one minute. What I did was more valuable to me than any place I could have gone or thing I could have done in those years."

Prada and Bertelli's apartment is large but not lavish. The main room—where they carry out most of their social life—is an airy, modified A-frame that functions as sitting room, living room, dining room, and art gallery. When I arrived, a middle-aged woman was sitting on a couch sipping prosecco. She introduced herself as "Manuela Pavesi, Miuccia's best friend." Then Prada walked in. She was dressed casually, but with care: a brown tie-dyed cardigan over a flouncy black dress, diamond earrings, purple stockings, and Kelly-green silk pumps. "It's just us, the kids, and Manuela," she said to me, smiling. "Bertelli left. He screamed at me because I am trying to diet and I am serving fish. He said you don't want fish. He said you liked meat and red wine. I am serving fish and white wine. He told me the wine I selected is awful, then he went to Florence." She shrugged and sat down on the couch next to her friend. (I had eaten lunch with Bertelli the day before, at one of his favorite restaurants, in a strip mall not far from his office, near Arezzo. We had had steak and a lot of red wine—which Bertelli, as is his custom, chose. Bertelli can seem intimidating; he is a big man, with a hawk's nose, white hair, the frown of an intellectual, and the severe, slightly retro black glasses favored by Italians who take themselves seriously. He is fifty-seven and doesn't appear to have had a moment of self-doubt in his life. He is also surprisingly eager to please. Not long after we arrived at the restaurant, he stormed into the kitchen, inspected the meat, tasted three wines, found one acceptable enough to drink, brought me a glass, and then, reluctantly, sat down. Bertelli's talents as a cook are well known, and normally, I was told by the proprietor, he attempts to prepare the food himself.)

"So tell me about my husband," Prada said, leaning toward me with great interest. "Honestly, I have no idea what he is like." This is a bit of shtick—but it's also, quite possibly, true. Prada and Bertelli have a strange, volcanic relationship, and she admits it freely. So do their friends and many of the people who work for them. Bertelli often checks on Prada's work. "It can be annoying," she said. "But when he puts his hands on a product, I have to admit, it becomes better." Later, she said, "It's a common notion that I am not commercial, that I am too sophisticated. Actually, can I tell you something? I am the most commercial person in this company. Bertelli wants to act like he is, but he often could care less. I want my work to sell."

When I asked Bertelli how their responsibilities were divided, he threw his arms into the air. "I don't know," he joked. "We haven't worked that out yet." Bertelli and Prada have been known to argue so violently that employees have had to dodge the things they throw at each other. And it's not just at work. "They fight like animals," Germano Celant told me. "But they are the perfect complement to each other. She is all intellect and ideas, and he brings it all down to earth." It's obvious that they enjoy each other's company, and even many of their battles, but it's not always pleasant to be there. Once, a few years ago, when a strained business meeting got out of hand—the two disagreed fundamentally about a product—Bertelli erupted, shouting, "I'll piss on your shitty handbags!" They continued fighting for a while, then went home and had dinner.

Prada will often say something bad about Bertelli but almost never fails to add something nice. I once asked her about a highly confrontational comment of his, asserting that fashion houses need salesmen more than they need people like her. "Lots of houses do fine without a creative designer," he said. The comment came in 2000, after Prada bought the company of the perfectionist German designer Jil Sander, who quit soon afterward rather than cut expenses or accede to Bertelli's demands. (Last year, in a sign that Bertelli was either maturing or scared, Sander returned.)

The remark was widely regarded as particularly harsh, considering what Bertelli's wife does for a living. "Bertelli wishes that the world were like that," she told me in her office one day. "He hates being dependent on somebody like a designer. So he makes these huge offensive statements. But I don't know what he really thinks. He might be much more complicated than he looks."

Prada's teenage sons appeared for dinner. They are handsome, polite, and wholly uninterested in eating with adults they don't know. They bolted their food, replied to their mother's inquiries about school with one-syllable words, spoke rapidly to each other in Italian. ("My God, they are supposed to know English. They are learning English." She asked them, "Do you understand one word?") Dinner consisted of lobster bisque, grilled sole, potatoes, and radicchio, followed by a rich torte. The wine was good. "This is not a diet meal," Pavesi said at one point. "I don't know what you are talking about."

Pavesi and Prada met in 1973. "We were dressed in the same completely strange way," Pavesi said. She was an editor of Italian Vogue, then worked for years as a photographer, and these days is employed by Prada. The two share a feminism that is leavened by a strong desire to succeed as wives and mothers. Prada says that it's not easy. "I saw so many women who gave up because of the family—just gave up their lives. You give up and you are killed. Bertelli leaves all the time. I say I want to go to the mountains for a week, and he says I am a horrible mother and a bad wife. He can go to the America's Cup for months, and that is O.K. But me . . ." She trailed off. "To do what you want is an everyday struggle."

Earlier, she told me, "In my private life, as an idea with my husband, I decided that I want maybe sometimes to officially obey and shut up and let him have the last word. To play a certain role. And when that happens I tell him, 'Do you know how much I hate you when I have to do this?' " She returned often to the subject of her role as a woman, a wife, and a mother: "I really believe in the principle of feminism, but I also feel that when it is too tough it makes you give up too many things that you like. So I am trying to retain the pleasure of being a woman. I don't want to give up my independence, but I also don't want to forget to enjoy the feminine part of my life."

She was distressed about how little the young women she knew cared about these issues. "Sometimes I think that the obsession with fashion is just about the desperation of being sexy," she said. "My young assistants come to work and they wear these amazing things. Very provocative. And they are so obsessed about being beautiful and sexy, and they are always alone. And I tell them that the more they dress for sex the less sex they will have. It's so basic, but they don't seem to understand me."

Over dessert and coffee, Prada and Pavesi talked about marriage. "I have often wondered if I would stay with Bertelli just for the children, even if for no other reason," Prada said. "I know a lot of people do that." Pavesi looked shocked. "But it's easy for me to say that," Prada continued, "because in the end things are more good than they're bad. I never get bored, and we respect each other."

Pavesi laughed. "Are you kidding? You are his one great weakness. His Achilles' heel."

Prada grunted, but smiled, too. "He could never find another woman as patient as I am."

"But you are so stubborn," Pavesi replied. "You are impossible."

Prada sat silently for a moment and sipped her wine. "I am always checking to see how I feel about my life and my marriage," she said. "I am always asking myself if it's good enough. Is everything the way I want it to be? And the truth is, I have to admit, I may hate him and want to kill him, but late at night when he comes home I am always at least a little bit happy."

The following morning, I met Prada at Linate Airport. We were flying to Dino de Laurentiis's studios, on the outskirts of Rome, so that she could watch the filming of a fake version of a reality-television show funded by her foundation. The "show" was conceived by the young Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli. Vezzoli, who has managed to combine in his work twin passions for cinema and embroidery, will stage the results later this month in Milan, at the foundation. "I don't have time for this today," she said to me as the small jet jumped into the sky. "My collection is in trouble. But how could I miss it?"

Vezzoli likes to play with people's perceptions of themselves. This time, he had chosen the most obvious possible vehicle for that: reality television, which is as popular in Italy today as it is in America. In 1964, the director Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled around Italy and made a documentary called "Comizi d'Amore," or "Love Meetings." In it, he interviewed a wide range of people and asked them about their sexual attitudes; the discussion was extraordinarily frank for that time, and the film lasted only a week in theatres. Vezzoli decided to play on that documentary and to stage a reality-television show called "Comizi di Non Amore," in which young men would audition for the attentions of single women and in the process reveal their feelings about sex and society. Pasolini included famous people—and so did Vezzoli. Nobody involved in the production knew that it was "art," except Prada, Vezzoli, the moderator, and the women who appeared on the show as guest stars: Catherine Deneuve, Marianne Faithfull, Jeanne Moreau, and Antonella Lualdi, an aging Italian actress who appeared in the original film.

The show is essentially a souped-up version of "The Dating Game." Scores of people waited patiently in the audience for hours, hoping to be selected as contestants. Prada sat in the back, beaming. At one point, after three competing men made a particularly heartfelt attempt to win a date—the attempt included a graphic dance by a potential gigolo and a half-dressed woman in thigh-high stiletto boots—Prada turned to me and said, "The trashy part of my soul is completely satisfied. Everyone here thinks this is genuine. We no longer know what is real in our society. So this little subversion is our way of exploring that."

Vezzoli was even more ecstatic. "We have taken it all from Pasolini," he told me. "He called TV interviews the lowest point of humiliation that a human can endure—forty years ago. Pasolini understood even before Warhol where our society was going." Vezzoli paused, and asked, "What would Pasolini hate most if he were alive today? Reality television." Then he glanced at Prada, who was standing in a dressing room with Deneuve. "The idea that Miuccia Prada is producing a reality-TV show subscribing to the real rules of television and also demonstrating its perversity." Vezzoli almost lost his breath. "The fact that the most sophisticated woman in Italy is doing this. It's just incredible."

On the flight home, I asked Prada if there wasn't something a bit sad—maybe even exploitative—about making art based on a hoax, out of what seemed to me the frail lives and dreams of normal humans. "That is what art should be," she said. "The exploration of who we are and what we want to become. Is there ever any other subject?"

Patrizio Bertelli's goal has always been clear: he wants to run the world's most successful luxury-goods house. In the nineteen-eighties, when Prada bags and shoes first gained popularity, Bertelli insisted that if small, high-priced boutiques wanted to receive the accessories that sold so well for them they also had to carry the new line of women's clothing. The strategy prevented many such shops, with their limited display space and tight budgets, from offering the work of competing designers, which was exactly what Bertelli had in mind. Shop owners wanted the shoes and the bags, so they also took the clothes—and Prada elbowed its way onto the shelves of stores throughout Europe and America. At the end of the nineties, when the global economy was sound, the dollar strong, and the luxury market growing rapidly, Bertelli decided to expand again—and to challenge Gucci and L.V.M.H., the global brands best known for luxury goods.

Bertelli went on an international shopping spree, and during the next two years bought major interests in Helmut Lang, Jil Sander, Church's shoes, Azzedine Alaia, the apparel-maker Genny, and Car Shoe. He also entered into a joint venture with an eyewear manufacturing company, and picked up a twenty-five-per-cent stake in Fendi (which he later sold). The Prada Group is privately owned, so it is not required to release spending figures. But company officials told me that those purchases cost about seven hundred million euros (around nine hundred million dollars at today's exchange rate).

By any reckoning, it was a lot of money. And, like nearly any head of an ambitious private company, Bertelli decided to finance his purchases by selling stock to the public. An offering was planned for September, 2001. The timing could not have been worse. After September 11th, seven-hundred-dollar black sweaters no longer seemed essential. The market for luxury goods all but collapsed. The public offering was withdrawn, and by the end of that year the company's debts—about 1.7 billion euros—roughly equalled its sales. It was not an enviable position for a large company. Since then, the euro has gained in value against the dollar, and that makes European goods particularly expensive for Americans. Prada projects that its net profit will rise more than thirty per cent this year; it's an impressive rate of growth, but the euro is now so strong that earnings will be about the same as last year's. The Prada Group's debts remain, though Bertelli says that they will be cut in half, to less than a billion euros, by the end of this year.

"You should remember that our debt is not due to mismanagement or to management-related losses,'' he told me. "We did carry out a number of acquisitions, and going public was supposed to help pay for those programs. Nobody was prepared for September 11th." Bertelli again wants to seek money from the most obvious source: the stock market. But he is a famously difficult leader, and many have asked whether he can accommodate a board and the public. Also, both he and his wife focus heavily on the quality of their products—it's one reason they cost so much. I asked him if Prada as a public company could retain its level of craftsmanship, and he replied, in many words, that he didn't see why not.

His wife is not so sure. "It seems that you are not allowed to do anything good except for money,'' she told me when I asked her about it. "It's funny, when we talk about the stock market with investors, our favorite activities, like the foundation, the big beautiful stores—it looks all wrong to them. You have to demonstrate that they will make money or you have not to do them. That is why I really don't want to go to the stock market. Everything you do has to be immediately profitable. We never built our company that way. Sometimes they ask me to do a bag that sells ten thousand, and I say, 'You want a bag that sells ten thousand? Do it yourself.' Because that is not how I work. I do the job and, finally, if it's good it will make money. You can't sit there and say it the other way around. If the product is excellent, people will be impressed. If not, everyone will know it."

The next time I saw Prada was the day before the show. Her anxiety had lifted. She looked tired but happy. The workroom behind the cavernous space on the ground floor of the headquarters complex where Prada presents her collections was crowded with seamstresses, assistant designers, models, and technicians. Prada sat with Fabio Zambernardi fine-tuning outfits—ditching a belt here, adding a shawl there, making a model step out of high heels and put on men's shoes instead. ("This is how you take one of the sexiest women in the world and make her the opposite,'' Prada said to me with a mischievous grin.) At precisely 6 p.m., two stewards appeared with a steam cart full of hors d'oeuvres and a chilled bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Prada was the first person at the table. She poured two glasses of champagne and offered one to me. I wondered how she had overcome the crisis that had gripped her just a week earlier. "You mean why did I freak out like that?" she asked, laughing. "Well, the day you are stuck everything seems like a tragedy. You can't see the finished clothes. You are only working with an idea, and so you start to wonder if the idea was any good to begin with. You start to question your talent, you think maybe you are no longer capable of what you could once do.

"Then the materials come in, and you realize what you had in mind. I am happy with what I see. It is just what I wanted.'' Only a week before, her workroom tables had been covered with nothing but sketches and scraps of wool. Now racks of silk dresses printed with computer patterns, wool suits trimmed with jewels, and elaborately stitched fur jackets lined the corridors.

Prada felt that she had managed to combine romantic visions of the past with romantic notions of the future—and to do it in her own quirky way. I asked if she was nervous. "Of course, I am nervous—how can you not be nervous?'' she said. "But when my work is good . . ." She stopped herself. "We will just have to wait till tomorrow."

The next day, she sat quietly in the staging area behind the catwalk as an army clad in Prada shades of black, navy, dark gray, and brown readied thestage, prepared the security, and ushered the models to their positions. Rem Koolhaas had designed murals of Mars to accompany the music for the show: "Peter and the Wolf" spliced with Holst's "Planets," to produce contradictory visions of romance. Prada was dressed in a blue sweater, a black skirt, and high-heeled pumps. Across her chest she wore a diamond brooch in the shape—and almost the size—of a tree branch. "Where did you get that?" I asked. She smiled broadly. "Bertelli gave it to me for Christmas,'' she said. "Isn't it amazing?"

Suddenly, the show began. Prada stood at the entrance to the runway, making sure that every girl looked exactly the way she was supposed to. She watched on a monitor for twenty minutes as her eclectic interpretation of elegance was put on parade. When the show was over, Prada appeared on the runway, reluctantly, as always, and only for a second. She smiled, and so did her husband, who had come backstage with a glass of champagne in his hand. "Wasn't Miuccia strong?" he asked me. The critics certainly thought so. Women's Wear Daily called the collection "masterful." In the Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes described it as one of "heroic elegance," and noted that Prada had "once again changed the register of fashion." In the Times, Cathy Horyn wrote, "With Tom Ford possibly headed for Hollywood . . . this city is now down to one superpower: Miuccia Prada."

Prada was pleased, but she doesn't take compliments easily. "I never understood fashion,'' she said when I asked her about the reaction to the show. "The whole world of it—the photographers, the celebrity status. I don't get it at all. I like clothes. I love clothes. But fashion and fame . . . Sometimes I just don't know." You could almost see the gears whirling in her head. "It's fun—it's wonderful," she said as fans started to surround her. "But it's something to keep you busy for ten minutes in the morning. Then you still have to face the rest of the day."