Miuccia Prada: ‘Ugly fashion’

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New episodes of Good Bad Billionaire will be released weekly on Mondays wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes a week early first on BBC Sounds.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money from zero to their first million and then from a million to the billions.

Then we judge them.

Are they good, bad or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Sing, a journalist and an author.

And I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And on this episode, we have the first lady of fashion herself.

The devil wears it.

It's Mutia Prada.

So let's break down Mutia Prada by numbers.

She's actually 75 years old, so she's been going in this industry for a very long time.

And she's worth a cool 6.2 billion US dollars.

That was news to me, and that puts her comfortably in the top 500 richest people in the world right now.

She turned her grandfather's shop into a fashion beast called the Prada Group.

And that includes tons of other brands, 26 factories and nearly 15,000 employees.

So a personal story, I actually did an event for Prada once for one of their brands, Mew Mew.

And the insider gossip that I can tell you is that everyone within the company calls her Madame Prada.

Well, listen, this is going to be your episode, I reckon, because I know less about fashion than anyone in the world.

And you are, I think, comfortably one of the best dressed dressed podcaster journalists in Britain.

I can think of a few people who can vie for that crown, but this is as much a business story and a money story as it is a fashion story because not a lot of people in fashion make this money.

No, but it's one of the biggest industries in the world.

It's thought to be worth about $1.8 trillion.

It's hugely important for the European economy and Italy is right at the heart of the industry.

So Michael has run the heart of the empire from Milan for over four decades along with her husband, and they really do make quite the pairs, we'll find out.

Yes, when they met, she thought he was making cheap knockoffs of some of her designs.

He is also known for his very fiery temper.

He has smashed store windows before.

And when I think of Prada, I think of minimalist.

I suppose that's what she's celebrated for, the minimalist design of her clothes.

Yeah, it's been called intellectual design.

You know, unlike these other Italian designers, you know, like Dolce and Gabbana, like Gucci, Prada as a fashion label doesn't do sexy, racy designs.

They do kind of the thinking woman style, I want to say.

And she's not a lover of jeans.

When asked once if she's ever owned jeans, she replied, one pair once in the 80s.

And this will come as no surprise to those of you who like Prada.

She's been called the master of ugly.

What does that mean?

Basically, I think it communicates this idea that the stuff that she designs isn't appealing to the male gaze.

You know, it's very much a woman's woman's take on fashion.

Yeah, well, and she also has an eye for art.

She owns over 900 works by artists, including Jeff Coons, He of the Big Bubble Dog, Damien Hurst, He of the Shark, and Anish Kapoor.

I mean, that art collection has got to be worth a fortune on its own.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, she also must have the space to store them all because Anish Kapoor's artwork is very massive.

It's massive.

She even apparently has a tube slide designed by an artist called Karsten Holler from her office down to the courtyard below.

So, you know, she's got a sense of fun.

Yeah, not the first slide one of our billionaires have had.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, in the chief exec's office.

There was a slide out the back door, so must have accessory for a billionaire.

I don't think, on the other hand, Sergei Brin ever became a mime artist.

So she must be one of the first billionaires, actually, maybe the only billionaire we'll ever cover, who at one point wanted to be in mime.

So, Mucha Prada, lover of art, mime, and ugly fashion.

But is she good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Let's go back to the beginning to find out.

So, we start with Mutcha from zero to her first million.

She wasn't actually born Mutia Prada, which I was surprised by.

I assumed that was her name, but no, her real name is Maria Bianci.

She was born in 1949 in Milan, Italy, and the name Mutia Prada will actually come decades later into her life.

Yeah, I wonder how many other art billionaires have started life under a different name.

We'll have to have a think about that.

She was born, though, to a wealthy family.

That'll be important when we come to score her later on.

She grew up in a a four-storey 19th-century apartment building where she still lives today.

Her father, Luigi Bianchi, headed a company that manufactured putting green mowers, so not very glamorous.

No, and her mother, Luisa, was an heiress to a leather goods company known as Fratelli Prada, the Prada brothers.

So the store had been established in 1913 by Mucha's grandfather, Mario, and his brother.

So it sold travel items, leather goods, glassware, all made in Italy.

And it was a big deal during the 1920s and 30s.

It even at one point became the supplier to the royal family of Italy.

However, Mario Prada had some old-fashioned ideas.

He didn't believe women should have a role in business so he prevented female family members from entering his company.

Very old school, very sexist.

But in 1958 he passed away and his son actually didn't care about the company.

So Mucho's mother Luisa took over the store.

We need to sort of place Milan here in the fashion world because post-war it becomes quite a design hub hub of Italian industry.

Right, so people over the world began to source and collect Italian design, you know, everything from those iconic scooters, sports cars, clothing, accessories.

You know, there's a reason Milan design even today draws thousands of people from all over the world.

Yeah, it's sort of, I think of the 60s, like early 60s as being kind of Sophia Lorraine in a headscarf driving a convertible Ferrari with everyone going, ciao, and meet, meet, meet, meet on their little vespers as well.

The height of sheet.

But having said that, even though you know, people like Sophia Lauren were pushing Italy's reputation as the country of chic elegance abroad, women in Italy were actually not getting very far in society.

So it wasn't accepted that this married bourgeois woman like Louisa could actually run a shop.

So actually, they had to get two businessmen to run it for her.

Yeah, in fact, later in life, when Mucha was asked if she helped out in the shop, she was shocked and said she only visited twice as a child, explaining it was not a woman's place.

Mucha rarely actually gives details about her childhood but she kind of sums it up once as serious.

It was a serious Catholic family.

My mother liked clothes but she liked correctness more.

Yeah and in this environment Mucha herself was bright, she was politically active and this was a period of great political change.

Mucha ended up at the University of Milan studying political science and she said, I really believed we could transform the world.

Yeah, because this is around that time of the summer of love, isn't it?

In 1968 Milan students were protesting in solidarity with the sort of epicenter of it in Paris, railing against consumerism, ha ha ha, and championing Marxist ideas.

And this is where Mucha's life story is really interesting, right?

Because, you know, how does a woman like this end up in fashion, of all things?

Because she actually becomes a member of the Union of Italian Women, which is a feminist offshoot of the Italian Communist Party.

Yeah, looking back on that time, she says, my big dreams were of justice, equality, and moral regeneration.

I i was a communist but being left-wing was fashionable then i was no different from thousands of middle-class kids i think that you know that's the hypocrisy of youth isn't it sometimes i know it's it's a luxury you can only have when you're in your 20s exactly she was different though from other students they wore jeans to protest she wore yves saint laurent dresses and high heels and she said i hated the bourgeois people who felt they had to dress in jeans when you knew they didn't want to.

I would love to see Mucha Prada on the front lines of the Paris 68 riot.

Right, wearing Yves Saint-Laurent high heels.

She's bright, though.

She went on to get a PhD in political science and then made a very surprising career move, which you hinted at a minute ago.

Right, so she spent five years at the Piccolo Teatro training to become a mime artist.

So at this point, Mucha Prada is a communist mime artist.

I mean, really, it's almost like the setup to a joke, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So the silence of mime, apparently, was a huge boon for a shy woman like Mucha.

She said, I got very serious and I was a really good mime, especially when it was abstract.

It's fun controlling your body.

But her parents stepped in, forbade her from continuing her mime career and demanded that she join the family business.

So at 23, she puts aside her dreams of becoming Italy's greatest mime.

But reluctantly, you know, she feels as a feminist that a career in fashion is actually demeaning.

She said, I had to have a lot of courage to do fashion because in theory, it was the least feminist work possible.

Of course, I liked it a lot but I also wanted to do something more useful.

Interesting that fashion feminism, the interface between those two things.

And Mutia Prado also bear in mind she's a trained mime artist but she isn't actually very well qualified for the job of designing accessories which is in her family's line of work.

She famously herself said that she can't draw.

Yeah, then in the late 1970s her mother retired and Mutia took over the shop as well as designing the accessories.

And at this point it was still just one shop.

The company's glory days from the 20s and 30s were seemingly long long behind it and annual sales were just 45 000 that's not a lot so you know she is a long way off becoming a millionaire but in the year she took over her shop at a trade fair she meets someone who had changed the course of her life and her business like many of our billionaires there's always a key person there this was a man called patrizio bottelli a loud-mouthed tuscan entrepreneur with big dreams who ran a leather factory in Italy.

Yeah, and he was making, in her opinion, cheap knockoffs of her bags.

She found him argumentative, arrogant, and of course, they instantly hit it off.

I mean, opposites attract, as the old saying goes.

So they begin both a romantic and a business relationship.

This feels like a tempestuous one.

This, like, it's been described as volcanic.

They had huge arguments, so violent that employees say they had to dodge things when they threw stuff at each other.

Patrizio also has a renowned temper.

Muta has said, I always tell him you like this reputation or you change it.

And he told her to have bigger ambitions and take more risks.

He also became the main supplier to Prada.

So together they started making changes to revive the dying brand.

Patricia convinced her to add shoes to their line and open a second shop in Milan.

She actually also disliked the bags they already stocked, so she's described them as old and bourgeois and boring.

So she found this factory making a fabric called Pocono, which is a kind of material they use for parachutes.

It's kind of silky and strong nylon.

And she released this nylon bag in 1984, which was a little backpack.

Yeah, but 1984 was perhaps too soon.

That didn't fit with that decade's thirst for traditional luxury.

But as I say, it's not the last we'll hear of these bags.

No, these bags are going to get very, very famous.

Meanwhile, Patrizio had been getting their more traditional luxury goods out there to meet that kind of need.

So Prada leather bags and gloves were stocked in US department stores, you know, upmarket ones.

And in 1985, Mutro released what's now known as the classic Prada handbag.

You know, it's sturdy, it's functional, it's sleek, but it has quality craftsmanship at the heart.

So it became an instant hit.

Somebody please explain to me the handbag thing.

I don't get it.

People will spend £10,000, £20,000.

You've got the Birkin bag, you've got Gucci bags.

It just seems to be...

the epicenter of a kind of, I don't understand the mindset around it.

Can you help me?

It is funny.

I think handbags are different from clothes and shoes in that you could conceivably bring a handbag around with you everywhere.

You know, you don't have to change it as often as you change your clothes.

You probably don't need to wash it, so it's probably quite long wearing.

So in a way, you can rationalize it to yourself as being the most sensible purchase you can make.

I suppose for men, a posh watch might be the kind of equivalent, you know, like a Rolex or a Patek Philippe or something, a quiet sign of quality which you carry everywhere with you.

Exactly.

And you know, if you're meeting people in a business setting, you shake their hands, they see your watch.

You meet someone in a business setting, if you're a woman, you put your handbag down, they see the handbag.

It's kind of the same thing.

Got it.

Thanks for that little primer.

So Patricio has a head for business, while Mutcha has an eye for designing the new thing that people wanted, basically.

And an art historian called Germano Kellent described it as, she is all intellect and ideas.

He brings it all down to earth.

They fight like animals, but they are the perfect complement to each other.

Opposites really do attract.

Yeah, and in 1987, they get married after eight years of living together, but she doesn't take his name.

Instead, she convinces her unwed aunt to adopt her so she can officially have the Prada family name to match the business that she runs.

And her nickname was Mucha, so she becomes Mucha Prada.

There we go.

And in 1988, she finally turns her hand to designing clothes.

So she's actually been quite reluctant to do this because she sees designing clothes as frivolous, but Patrizzio, in usual, his usual manner, threatened to hire hire somebody else if she didn't step up and do it.

Yeah, so her debut women's wear collection, kind of based on Mucha's own minimalist wardrobe, and it ran counter to the 1980s ideas of excess being synonymous with luxury.

1980s, you weren't probably weren't around.

Sadly, sadly.

Glint in my parents' eye.

But it was all kind of big hair, shoulder pads.

If you ever seen those old TV shows like Dynasty or Dynasty and Dallas, that was the kind of vibe.

It was very, very flashy.

So understandably, given the context, critics really liked it, but it was still very much under the radar.

But Patrizio did a deal with some of the US boutiques.

If they wanted to stock the popular accessories, they also had to stock the new line of clothes.

So if you want the accessories which are popular, you've got to take the clothes too.

And this is really clever, right?

Because it introduces the clothes to the American market, but it also literally physically takes up space.

So it stops the shop from stocking other designers.

So you're basically taking up the retail space from someone else and this clothing line the introduction of this gives her another chance to have a crack at selling these nylon bags and suddenly fashion editors seem to love them she built on the buzz she sent the backpacks out to key editors as christmas presents it's very interesting how the fashion world works magazine editors are literally your rainmakers aren't they they really are and you will not believe the amount of stuff that they get sent i had a previous life as a fashion journalist for different magazines when i remember when i first started i I did not understand how you would have a fashion editor come in and they would be carrying a £5,000 bag.

And then someone explained to me that they just get gifted this stuff all the time.

Well, it worked because by 1990, the Prada backpack was the must-have item and they were making plenty of money from it.

The backpack retailed at just under $500

and that was a lot back then.

It would be over $1,000 in today's money.

There's a fashion journalist called Dana Thomas who describes the backpack as the emblem of the radical change that luxury was undergoing at the time.

The shift from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market.

Yeah, that's interesting that it becomes rather than little boutiques selling bespoke goods in small quantities, you've got this globalization of fashion really starts taking off.

But the bag proved such a hit, Prada's rivals got in on the action.

Fendi, for example, Gucci, Armani, they all released their own versions of luxury backpacks.

So it's hard to pinpoint exactly at which point Mucha became a millionaire.

So we know she was born into wealth, but you know, the business was struggling when she took it on.

It was also a completely private company at that time.

So the profits from Prada stayed within the family.

They went to Mucha and Procizio and her two siblings.

But because of the popularity of this Prada nylon backpack in 1990, sales for Prada were 50 million US dollars.

So we can probably say that at this point,

1990, at the age of 41, Mucha is officially a millionaire.

And she also has two sons under the age of two, so she's got her hands full.

But how does Muchaprada go from a million to a billion?

Because as I said before, a lot of people in fashion never get anywhere close to a billion.

Fashion is a very expensive industry.

And billion is a big number, as we've said before.

So next we'll look at how Muchaprada goes from a million to a billion.

Well, it all has to do with the changing times.

In the 90s, the industry was undergoing basically a revolution.

Yeah, well, they were going away from conspicuous wealth and that glitzy, brash look of the 80s towards Mutia's signature style, which was minimalist.

And Prada really captured this zeitgeist.

So if you talk to people in the fashion industry, one of the things that comes up about Prada's designs is this term called ugly chic.

You know, you have knee-length skirts, you have quite masculine cuts of tailoring, you know, elements of school uniform, business attire.

A British stylist called Katie Grant once said that she saw Mucha Prada standing in the studio, in her words, this very prim, calf-length, pleated white dress, and you could see straight through to her electric pink underwear.

That mixture of being sober and conservative and something quite shocking is totally Prada and totally her.

You know, if you were a guy and you saw someone wearing that on a tube, you'd think to yourself, that woman's mad.

She's gotten dressed without looking at herself in the mirror.

But for a woman seeing it, you're like, yes, you go queen.

You know, for Mucha, I think this is kind of her feminist response to being in the fashion industry at a time when everyone is saying that sex sells.

You know, this industry, even though fashion is still selling to women, women's wear is actually still mainly designed by men.

Yeah, and she said, to your point, exactly, I want to escape the convention of what is sexually appealing, to work with an idea that you can be sexy without being obvious.

Beyond this insular world of fashion, one thing that also kind of uplifted Prada's fortunes was the power of celebrity, because celebrities were the ones who brought fashion and brands like Prada to public attention.

Yeah, and it was Uma Thurman at the 1995 Oscars who was nominated that year for Best Supporting Actress in Pulp Fiction.

She wore a lilac Prada dress.

Now, she didn't win, but the dress made the front pages the next day.

And it was a very simple kind of unexpect sleeveless lavender gown.

You know, it's very chic, very minimalist.

It's not very sexy, actually.

Isn't it?

Okay, I'll take your word for that.

I've got no comment on the matter.

And so Mucha and Fabrizio capitalized on this momentum and the Prada brand began to explode through the 1990s.

They launched a new label for a younger, more experimental woman called Mew Mew.

I've heard of that one?

Yep, it was a childhood nickname, so Mucha, Mew Mew.

Okay.

They also launched Prada Menswear, then Prada Sport, which is a kind of luxury sportswear line priced about 50% lower than the main collection.

And Prada wasn't the only or even the first luxury label to launch a sports line, but they were the first to embrace what is now known as athleisure, designer track suits, waterproofs, rather than those preppy polo and cricket jumpers that were popular in the sort of waspy clubs of New England and New York.

So they were opening stores globally, although when Patrizio was overseeing a new store, something he always got personally involved in, he actually ended up smashing its windows with a hammer because he didn't like the way it was decorated.

So still, that

explosive temper didn't slow things down there.

Prada now had almost 100 stores worldwide, and this meant by 1998, Prada sales were estimated to be $850 million.

If you remember, back in 1990, they were 50 million.

That's a 17-fold increase in just eight years, a really fast growth.

But the couple didn't sit back to enjoy their success.

So, Patrizio wanted to expand the Prada empire.

Yeah, he wanted to build a luxury multi-brand giant that could rival the likes of LVMH, owned by Bernard Arnaud, one of our billionaires.

You can check out that story in our archive, and of course, what was going on at Gucci as well.

So, his first big move was to buy a 9.5% stake in Gucci for $260 million.

Most of this money was actually borrowed, although there's a Forbes article from that time which describes its source as something of a mystery.

Yeah and Gucci was struggling at this time.

It was at risk of being taken over by Bernard Arno at LVMH.

So Patrizio was a lifeline to Gucci, but his purchase confused people.

Prada couldn't afford to completely take over Gucci and it was a direct rival.

So it's a strange transaction in many ways.

But then Patrizio sells his stake in Gucci to its rival, Bernard Arnault, at LVMH.

Can we talk about the business sense of this?

Because that seems like a crazy move to me.

Yeah, well, I mean, it sounds like it was like all these things, a bit of a gamble.

So you buy nine and a half percent stake in Gucci, which is struggling, so it needed the money.

And then he realizes what Bernard Arnaud is trying to build at LVMH and realizes this Gucci stake may be actually more valuable to Bernard Arnaud than it is to him.

So he makes a profit on that stake.

It makes him $140 million.

It helps Bernard Arnaud on his journey to be the richest man in the world.

Good business sense or got a bit lucky, bit of both.

That's usually the story.

But it's a big cash injection for Patrizio at this time.

He does make a tidy profit from it.

So he decides to start a two-year shopping spree.

Between 1999 and 2001, Prada buys stakes in over 10 fashion companies with interests and brands including Fendy, Joe Sander, Helmut Lang, Eliyah, and Churches.

And together, they shell out about $750 million on all these companies.

$750 million, at three-quarters of a billion dollars.

They're making themselves a bit of a hostage to fortune by spending that kind of money in such a short period of time.

So with this massive growth, and they've got a public offering, they're going to sell shares to the public and then what they call an IPO.

They had that planned for the autumn.

In July 2001, Forbes magazine estimated Mutia Mutaprada to be worth $1.4 billion based on what they think is going to be the value of this company once it sells shares to the public.

So, Mutaprada, according to Forbes, is a billionaire age 52, but things are about to come crashing down.

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So she's officially a billionaire, but we've hinted that things are not going to go as expected.

So how do they all come crashing down?

So Prada planned this IPO for the 20th of September 2001.

They hoped to raise $2 billion to pay off their little shopping spree.

But the IPO was cancelled for reasons we all know.

On September the 11th, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center derailed everything.

I remember the day the stock market crashed by over a thousand points.

It was something that really rocked the entire, well, politically and financially, rocked the world.

So it was reported by November 2001 that Prada's debt had reached at least the level of that year's revenue of $1.8 $1.8 billion.

And that's too much debt, really, because if the amount of debt you've got is more than the actual amount of money you're making in a mature business, that's usually a big distress sign.

So, Mutra and Patrizio end up selling Fendi to LVMH for $262 million in order to raise the cash to pay off that debt.

Yeah, but things also started unraveling with some of the brands that they had purchased.

Within six months of buying the German label Jill Sander, the designer, Jill Sander, quit.

Yeah, she refused to cut her company expenses.

She also refused to follow Patricio's demands, and the brand reported a loss for the very first time.

Well, Patricio managed to get Gill Sander back on side, persuaded her to return.

But then again, Prada sold the brand in 2004.

And it's interesting because these places are a house of brands and they horse trade them a little bit, like this will fit better in your portfolio.

So there is a bit of a musical chairs about who owns which brands.

It's a bit like Booze, actually.

If you think of a company like Diageo, it owns like Johnny Walker and Guinness.

And sometimes Perno Ricard will say, we want to buy that one off you.

It's a bit like that.

But I think the thing that makes fashion interesting, though, is that when you have a brand like Joe Sander or Prada, they're so synonymous with these head designers that sometimes if the company makes moves that the designer doesn't like, as in the case of Joe Sander, they can just say, see you later, you're not going to survive without me.

Yeah, and they had a similar experience with Helmut Lang.

After purchasing it, Profits Nose dies, designer Helmut lang retired so in 2006 prada also sold that company they had two more failed ipo attempts in 2002 and 2008 in 2002 you just had the dot-com crash in 2008 we're well into the great financial crisis so they keep getting rather bad timing for all their attempts to sell their shares all this meant that by 2007 forbes actually drops mutaprada off their billionaire list But despite the bleak outlook in business and the business not exactly doing very well, Muta actually continues to design collections for Prada and Miumiu that are really critically well received.

And then in 2006, there is that film.

Yes, a film called The Devil Where's Prada based on a 2003 novel and it actually takes the Prada name far beyond the fashion world because of its success.

Yeah, it features a fictionalized vogue editor, Anna Winter.

She's actually the devil in the title if you haven't seen the film.

Played by Merrill Streep.

So Anna Winter is this kind of towering figure in the fashion industry and she has so much say over it.

Is that I'm trying to think of anybody else in business who really has that kind of sway.

I suppose there are other people like in the art market, people like Larry Gargosian, Peggy Guggenheim.

They could make or break an artist if they decided to get behind them and Charles Saatchi as well.

But, you know, there's quite a few of them.

There isn't this one kingpin figure who is absolutely critical to success in that industry.

It's a remarkable thing, really.

It's a remarkable feat, a kingmaker or a queen maker.

Queen maker, exactly.

And Anna is actually a very well-established fan of Mucha's designs.

She said things like she dared to ask the questions, what is beauty, what is good taste?

All these years later, she continues to fascinate because she's still challenging conventions.

And obviously, having someone as powerful as Anna Winter in your corner has helped to keep Mucha in magazines and in style.

Actually, Mucha was actually just on the cover of American Vogue this year at the age of 74.

Wow.

But the entire luxury industry is going to get a massive shot in the arm thanks to the Asian market.

Where the luxury market was struggling in the West since the 2008 financial crisis, Prada Group and others were enjoying a boom in Asia, and that was the world's fastest-growing market for luxury goods.

So finally, in 2011, they get their IPA, their share sale, and they managed to sell the shares in Hong Kong.

And that valued Prada at $13 billion.

That's well behind LVMH's $77 billion, but Mutia is now a very rich woman.

She made about $675 million selling shares in the IPO, which means that she makes it back into the billionaire list from Forbes in 2012.

Yeah, and since then, Prada has continued to do well and buck some of the downturns in the luxury market.

So continues to grow, continues to do really well.

All this means she's worth around $6.2 billion.

Such news to me.

I had no idea she had that kind of money.

Today, Mucha, 75, still designs for both Prada and Mew Mew.

But in 2020, she asked Belgian designer Raf Simmons to be co-creative director with her.

That sounds like quite a big move to help with the succession plan.

Yeah, so she's actually thinking, I think, of her legacy and what comes next after she finishes that Prada group.

Yeah, in 2023, Mutcha and Patrizio stepped down as co-chief executives.

In an interview this year, she said, When people say, Are you happy about your achievement in fashion?

I really sincerely couldn't care less.

I think about what I have to do next.

I am ambitious.

I want to be good.

Quite the woman.

Yeah.

I believe that, though, in a way, there's something quite moving forward about her, isn't there?

There's not a want to rest on her laurels.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, even on that cover of American Vogue, and this is actually very unusual for the cover of Vogue, she isn't looking directly at the viewer.

She's actually looking sideways like she's looking forward.

Yeah.

So let's judge Mutcha Prada.

We'll start with wealth.

At $6.2 billion,

she's 480th in the world.

But in terms of fashion, she's right at the top of the tree.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

I would say that in fashion, you've got people like Bernard Arnaud, the owner of LVMH, who has been the richest man in the world, but...

He doesn't design clothes.

Yeah, he's an empire builder, not a clothes designer.

Exactly.

And actually, the kind of common idea of a fashion designer is someone who designs extraordinarily expensive clothes, but probably doesn't have that much money himself.

Like an Alexander McQueen or someone like that.

Exactly.

I can't tell you how many fashion designers there probably are in London right now who are designing out of a terribly ventilated, unheated warehouse somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah, so to get to that the heights she has in terms of wealth is unheard of really in the fashion designer business.

And also there's something about Prada which just screams success.

It exudes a kind of wealth way beyond the actual numbers of how much she's got in the bank account.

Exactly.

Like if you see someone wearing a head-to-toe Prada look, it's not like seeing someone zoom down a motorway in a Ferrari.

It's not ostentatious wealth, but it it is wealth nonetheless.

It's like that expensive watch thing.

You're meant to notice, but you don't sort of flaunt.

Exactly.

If you know, you know.

Okay.

All right.

So on wealth, then I'm going to give her higher than her absolute wealth would normally command.

So I'm going to give her a six.

Oh, I'm actually going to go higher than that.

I'm going to give her an eight out of ten because if you look at the full spectrum of how much people earn in fashion, very few people earn that amount of money.

So for me, she ranks pretty highly.

Okay, six from me, eight from you.

Next category, rags to riches.

She was born wealthy.

I mean, she inherited the name Prada.

You know, she inherited the shop.

I think she scores pretty low for me, to be honest.

Yeah, I agreed.

I'm going to give her a two for that one.

I'll give her a two as well.

Okay.

Now, villainy.

This is interesting.

There's basically her as a person, what she done to get ahead in life.

And there's also, I suppose, the world in which she operates because fashion and textile production, big carbon emitters, right in the crosshairs of ethical concerns right now?

Actually, Prada has been rated as not good enough for their environmental impact and labor conditions by a group called Good On You, which helps the UN kind of tackle fashion's environmental impact by assessing all this publicly available data.

But I have to think she's got to be better off than some of the very cheap, fast fashion that you see on the high street.

Because if I'm buying something costs $500 or $1,000, I'm hanging on to it.

And also, we should say that Prada have committed to being net zero by 2050 they don't use any longer virgin plastic in their products and their nylon for their famous bags is now recycled nylon so like many people they're moving in the right direction and then on her personal journey there's been some clever dealing shifting brands between them and lvmh and there was that buying and selling of the gucci steak and whatever but there doesn't seem to anything particularly underhand about the way they've accumulated their wealth no although if anything i think patrizio is slightly more of a villain figure given the the fact that he loves to shout and smash windows.

Yeah.

Although, I will say that one of the big missteps that Prada made in recent years has been in 2018, they actually had to stop selling dolls from a collection that appeared to feature blackface imagery after people made complaints of racism.

Important to say the brand apologised, denied it was the intention of the design, but they agreed to hire more racially diverse staff and check their design policies to stop anything like that from happening again.

If we just talk about the industry, first of all, I'm kind of conflicted about fashion because, for the one thing, I'm glad we don't all wear exactly the same clothes.

It is an expression of individuality, and that's something about sort of a democratic society in a free country, so that we don't all wear, you know, chairman Mao outfits or whatever.

I actually think there probably was a product collection with kind of similar inspired Maoist kind of vibe to it.

But on the other hand, there is a profligacy to fashion, which some people can find difficult, and I sometimes find a bit difficult.

You know, you just don't need that many clothes.

You don't need all those accessories.

It is conspicuous consumerism, and fashion is the engine of that.

Yeah, it's a difficult one for me because I love fashion and I love clothes.

But yeah, there is something about the relentless nature of putting out a spring, summer, autumn, winter collections with cruise collections, with resort collections coming in between.

It is a lot of clothing manufacturing.

Yeah, well, it creates lots of jobs there, on the other hand, and brings a lot of people, including yourself, a lot of pleasure.

Too much pleasure, probably, to my bank balance to handle.

Okay, so I'm going to score Villainy of the Industry at seven because I think it's responsible for an awful lot of waste.

But villainy for Mucha Prada herself at four.

Three, in fact.

I would give her overall maybe a five out of ten.

Probably, it would probably be less if she was a communist mime artist, not making any clothes.

But you're right, because of the industry she's in, it really does kind of push that number up.

Okay, philanthropy.

So we've mentioned Mucha is a big patron of the arts.

In 1993, she actually founded this organization called Fundazione Prada, which supports artists and hosts exhibitions.

It's got galleries in Milan and Venice.

That's not charity.

I'm sorry.

Show me a definition of charity which says spending hundreds of millions on art and opening a couple of little

species of art galleries.

Art is important.

It is.

However, Prada does donate 1% of its renylon revenues to Sea Beyond, which is an education program and scientific research program to protect the ocean.

Still, not tons of money.

One percent.

Prada Group has also supported cancer and COVID charities.

I'm not buying this.

You're not buying this, are you?

I'm going to give her a two.

I will confess to going to the Prada galleries, and they are very nice, but you know, I take your point, it is not exactly ending world hunger.

No, okay, so it's two from me.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh there.

No, I'll agree with you.

It's two from me as well.

okay power is another one of our categories it's a difficult one this isn't it because we've talked about people who can influence elections who can start wars but you could argue that fashion has this subliminally enormous power in our lives speaking of the devil wears prada there's a great scene where the anna winter figure played by meryl streep talks to anne hathaway's character who kind of thinks that fashion's all a bit lame and doesn't mean anything and she goes on this monologue about how the colour blue has been passed on and you suddenly find yourself wanting to wear the color blue for reasons you can't communicate and that will have been the power of fashion.

That will have been the power of people like Mutri Prada.

I think it really, this category really depends on how much power you think fashion as a whole has.

And obviously, you know, historically fashion's been seen as something that's feminine and therefore kind of frivolous.

But actually, I think fashion has a lot of clout behind it.

You know, it's one of the biggest industries in the world.

It would represent the seventh largest economy in the world, according to McKinsey, if it were ranked among other countries.

It's not a powerful concept in my life, as you can see.

I wonder also, in my sort of sneering attitude to fashion, whether there's a trace of sexism in that, and it's not important to me.

Maybe I'll confess to that.

And in fact, if you look at how many people it employs, it's a hugely important industry.

Is it any less important than sport?

Sport gives a lot of people a lot of pleasure, and so does fashion.

Yeah.

So I would give Mutia Prada's power a respectable six out of ten.

Really?

I expected you to go higher than that because you know that world.

There aren't many Mutia Pradas out there.

No, but then again, a lot of fashion companies live and die on the last collection they produce.

You could be yesterday's chip shop paper if you don't put out a fashion that people like.

I still think Muchaprada is a giant among fashion designers.

But in terms of where Prada sits in the fashion industry, you know, it could all come crashing down and it very nearly almost did, you know, post-2001.

Okay, so you're giving a six for power?

Feels weird this, and me scoring her higher than you would score her, but I'm going to give her a seven.

Okay.

Legacy.

I would score her higher than six out of ten for this.

I would say,

I would say eight out of ten for legacy.

Okay.

When there's a kind of recognizable Prada look that even you can point to.

Yeah, even you.

Even you.

Even you, she said, pointing across the table.

Exactly.

How rude.

People do know what the Prada look is like.

And I think that is all down to mutual Prada.

Okay.

When she goes, she will kind of leave behind an actual impression of a woman she was dressing, a kind of style she was kind of promoting.

And I think that image of a Prada woman is going to be around with us for a long time.

I agree.

As you say, even me, that denotes something in my world.

I think that has got some legacy for me.

So I'm going to give seven for legacy.

So does the devil wear Prada?

Is Mutia Prada good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Bearing in mind my view on the fashion industry generally, that would mark fashion generally in the bad camp for me.

But given that it exists and we're talking about an individual, I'm just going to go and say she's just another billionaire.

She doesn't mean that much to me.

I would say, and I know you think I'm going to put her into being a good billionaire.

Yes, I do.

Surprise me.

I would actually say that I was surprised that Mutra Prada is a billionaire to begin with, but I expected her, you know, with the feminist credentials and the intellectual background to kind of do a little bit more philanthropy-wise, given that she's one of the richest people in fashion.

So, if it was purely on her as a designer and what she's accomplished, she'd be a good billionaire.

But I have to say, I'm a little bit disappointed.

Yeah, well, you know, I'm a little bit surprised that given her money, she's only spent it on art, which I think is important, but not on philanthropy.

Yeah, when I think of philanthropic fashion people, I think of a kind of Stella McCartney who does more, a higher-profile charity stuff, circular fashion, all that kind of stuff.

So,

you've talked me into the bad category.

I'm going to say, sorry, Mutia Prada, you are a bad billionaire.

I'm going to say she's just another billionaire now.

Gosh, okay.

No, I can't.

I've said my piece.

You've said your piece.

I've said my piece.

I'm going to have to stick to it.

Having said that, she is, I sense, about to retire and move on to her next chapter.

So who knows, maybe Mutiprada the philanthropist is next.

Is about to emerge.

So, who do we have on next episode?

We have the director who brought us the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.

He's one of only four film directors to make the billionaire list.

And only one of three New Zealanders worth a billion.

It is Peter Jackson.

This podcast was produced by Hannah Hufford with additional production support from Tams and Curry.

James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minnell.

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