Miuccia Prada Quotations

I was a feminist in the Sixties, and can you imagine? The worst thing I could have done was to be in fashion. It was the most uncomfortable position.

Fashion fosters cliches of beauty, but I want to tear them apart.

What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today when human contacts go so fast. Fashion is instant language.

I always wanted to be different. I always wanted to be first.

Nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me. I'm attracted by nostalgia but I refuse it intellectually.

For me, art is about learning and about living with people. It's alive.

When I was younger, shopping helped me discover many new places and many new things.

I once tried to make lace - which has been a great obsession of women - unsexy. And I achieved it.

You have to always work against what you did before, and even against your taste.

Women often don't want to admit that they like fashion. And yet fashion enthralls everyone, from the taxi driver to the mega-intellectual. I have often asked myself why this is. I don't know the answer.

For me, it's important to anticipate where fashion is heading.

I always loved aesthetics. Not particularly fashion, but an idea of beauty.

If you ask, do you like strong men or weak men, I'd say, I like who I like.

It's horrible when people are only interested in buying labels, because it doesn't bring them the happiness they think it will.

The only way to do something in depth is to work hard.

I love clothes. Maybe I can say I don't love fashion, but I love clothes completely.

Basically I'm trying to make men more sensitive and women stronger.

I hate the idea that you shouldn't wear something just because you're a certain age.

My learning process is by eye alone it's not at all scientific.

I want to make clothes that are beautiful of course, but also clothes that are interesting and considered and intelligent and not out of place.

The moment you start being in love with what you're doing, and thinking it's beautiful or rich, then you're in danger.

Many of us grew up with a kind of puritanism against shopping. But shopping can be much more than how it is cast. If you are bored or you have problems, it can be a way of lifting your spirits, by doing something light and superficial. Why not?

Lengths are mainly around the knee, but, in the evening, it is really short. So it's mixed up in that way.

I am always researching new ideas on beauty and femininity and the way it is perceived in contemporary culture.

Basically, the idea is doing beautiful objects that you put together, ... So a lot of freedom -- in fact, we call it surplus because the idea is mixing materials, embroidery, sporty things.

I would say that we have the masculine shape that is kind of oversized. It's not a women's oversized, but it's men's pieces on women and a little bit more loose, not so narrow as it was before.

It is a time to look toward the future, without denying the past.

We really think that now evening should come back serious. For me it was interesting because I tried to do a serious evening, but where you feel yourself very comfortable. Usually ... you feel yourself during the day and when it's the evening, it's always a problem. Evening usually is too serious. So now it's very serious, but I tried to make it young and wearable.

Usually my ideas come from what I don't want to do, or what I find is old.

We started with this idea of doing something fancy... but with the basis of sport.

Enough of sweetness, women need to get out there and fight again.

So there are prints that look kind of geometric, but it's kind of a diamond, computerized tone ... with shades that look like light,

The mirrors reflect a sense of displacement in today's fashion, a lack of clear vision.

Always the problem with wanting to do structure is to do them in a way that still moves and is still comfortable, not really stiff,

It's a question of velocity - people want more and more speed and companies are more and more aggressive, ... It is now a two-month cycle and if you enjoy what you do and want to be first in the class, you have to speed up a lot.

It's all about wanting to go forward but still having to deal with nostalgia.

Talking about the democratization of fashion is just one of the many trite things people say these days.

They are mostly separates, ... We have some skirts matching with some blousons. Mainly, I showed the ones that I think are the more interesting.

In Europe the world of fashion is too conservative, very eighties.

The fashion world is very active and generous, despite the fact that it is not very well respected - or at least not as much as it should be.

I think more and more, if you live in the current world - and live internationally - it's all a mix of interests, and the same people who are interested in fashion are also interested in movies, art, and culture.

I would say that clothes are an excuse for living in the world.

We will always buy clothes because they let us live our dreams.

I suppose I felt guilty not to be doing something more important, more political. So in a way I am trying to use the company for these other activities.

Before I had kids, I was out every night of the week.

To have to be sexy? That I hate. To be outrageously sexy? That I love.

One’s life and passion may be elsewhere, but New York is where you prove if what you think in theory makes sense in life.

I just hate talking about myself.

I'm not interested in types. I'm interested in archetypes.

I wanted to try to push some freedom into the men's clothes.

I have to say that my husband and my children are so tough, there really is no space for pretension.

I'm not interested in how people dress.

I don't believe that anyone is not bothered by critics. I think that everybody cares.

I was a communist, but being left-wing was fashionable. I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.

Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.

I do what I think is right.

I had no fun. My family was too serious.

What people sometimes interpret as quirky is my attempt to subvert the concept of luxury by introducing elements that are considered ordinary or commonplace.

Now, I'm not saying I'm fashionable, but there are sociological interests that matter to me, things that are theoretical, political, intellectual and also concerned with vanity and beauty that we all think about but that I try to mix up and translate into fashion.

Fashion is an instant language.

Clothes can be important. I am learning this. For instance, often when I design and I wonder what is the point, I think of someone having a bad time in their life.

Fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But very little. After all, if you have a serious drama, who cares about the clothes?

I love uniforms because they allow you to hide. No one knows what you are thinking, so it's a very appropriate and correct way to be yourself.

I like to be useful to people.

Seduction is a matter of feelings and people opening themselves. I don't think it's something tricky - it's being human. And everybody is seduced by something different.

It's what I say all the time to my girls in the office here: The more they dress for sex, the less they will have love or sex.

Girls throw away so much energy in this search for beauty and sexiness.

Sex and the City is the opposite of dignity. You have to have dignity for your body - this is with men and women.

I am in a key moment. I kind of understand that I have to use my work more completely without being ashamed.

In America many things that are interesting are seen as odd.

My family was too serious. They didn't take care of me - it was a very serious and severe life. Not severe in a bad way; just boring - like totally neutral. I felt no emotion.

Women have the stress of being beautiful, of age and youth. Men don't have all that. And with women, that stress causes a lot of mistakes and bad choices - a lot of not being their true self.

Men are always much more dignified than most women.

I like getting older and being the person who people ask for help.

The older I get, the more I prefer to talk to old people. Old people or kids.

I remember being mad about having pink and red shoes. I gew up envying other girls' pink and red shoes.

If I have done anything, it is to make ugly appealing,

This is an example of hypocrisy

Craziness in a shoe is great - you can have much more freedom, you can exaggerate and it doesn't feel stupid. But to have too much craziness near your face, that would just feel weird.

Every day I'm thinking about change.

I try to make women feel more powerful without losing their femininity,

Ugly is attractive. Ugly is exciting.

When I design and wonder what the point is, I think of someone having a bad time in their life. Maybe they are sad and they wake up and put on something I have made and it makes them feel just a bit better. So, in that sense, fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But only a little.

Fashion is instant language.

The only way to do something in depth is to work hard. The moment you start being in love with what you're doing, and thinking it's beautiful or rich, then you're in danger.

The trouble is, most people are not so generous. Everybody wants love for themselves. I hear this all the time from the women I work with. I hear them say, "I want, I want." I never hear them saying what they want to give.

The process of a date, I think, is terrible. Horrible. Because everything is banal and predicted.

I realized that so many clever people respect fashion so much.

With women, the more unhappy they are, the more undressed they are.

Because of the Prada name, I can do things that people normally would not care about in the culture. I can have an exhibit by some forgotten artist who I love, and because it's Prada, people will come see it.

I like the irony in my work.

I want to confront myself. I challenge and doubt myself. Basically, what I don't like is to get bored.

I respect my work. But also I think it's very superficial.

I'm not interested in how people dress. Of course, I recognize if somebody's elegant. But fashion doesn't interest me.

Prada is something that should be so mundane, like clothes.

I don't like things that are obvious and so I always try to introduce something that is wrong, something that is different. Just beauty by itself is too easy.

People ask me how can I be stylish, how can I be elegant and what can I wear? My only answer is study! You have to learn.

You want to be understood by the sophisticated few but you also have to be more loud somehow, otherwise your message doesn't go through.

I am interested in communicating with the world by selling to many people.

I don't believe in people who think that clothes are not important.