“You know, any disturbance in the clothes is not deliberate because that’s exactly what I am It’s a reflection of myself. As well as the eponymous label, Prada Sport and the Miu Miu line, it owns and controls Jil Sander, Helmut Lang and Azzedine Ala? Despite the company’s debt – and Prada’s debt has been the subject of much insider speculation – hugely expensive, ground-breaking “epicentre” stores have opened in New York (designed by Rem Koolhaas) and Tokyo (courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron, architects of Tate Modern). I’m fed up of hearing people – basically my husband – saying that I am not able to do sexy clothes. You know, maybe a different label did a pair of trousers which make you look better from behind than ours But that’s hardly difficult So now I want to do clothes that are more appealing. I want to prove that I can do the most appealing clothes, that I can do trousers which make you look better from behind than anyone else’s.”ANY TEMPORARILY people-pleasing compromise aside, Miuccia Prada is, at heart, “a risk-taker” as American Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour once observed Today, the Prada Group is a multi-billion dollar concern. “I mean, it’s very easy to know what I like and it’s very easy to do what I like But I tend to have, let’s say, good taste This is very boring for me.

So, basically, I have to work with what I think is bad and wrong. In my company they’re always worried about that, everyone is always complaining.”More recently, and in this the designer gives the impression of having been brow-beaten into submission, she has, in fact, worked in a way that is more obviously, as she puts it, “appealing. For many years I’ve tried to work with an idea that you can be sexy without being obvious.” She also claims to find her job most interesting when she works against her own taste. That’s what I say to the girls in our office when they arrive in the morning with their high heels and their tummies exposed. The more sexy you make yourself appear; the less you’ll have sex, I tell them. You are desperate, I say.” Strong words indeed, and spoken with an almost evangelical sense of responsibility and matriarchal pride.”Seriously,” she says today, not wishing to seem judgemental even though she actually cannot help herself, “I am against nothing. Really, if people want to go around naked then that’s fine by me.”And this is one woman who is more than happy to put her money where her mouth is – even though in so doing she can, and apparently does, cause others in her company, and Bertelli in particular, a certain degree of f anguish.

Because while designer fashion, and Italian designer fashion in particular, is famous for churning out clothing that is at best stereotypically glamorous and, at worst, plain degrading, Prada’s contribution is anything but. From prints inspired by the table tops of American diners to the return of the haute bourgeoise in all her stolidly glamorous glory, and from funny bowling bags to footwear that might best be described as orthopaedic, Prada’s twice-yearly offerings continue, at times, to leave even the most fashion-knowledgeable bewildered. Few would dare to disagree with the pronouncements of Miuccia Prada, however. Time and time again, once even the most challenging collection arrives in store, six months after it was first shown, it is just exactly what the customer always wanted – even needed – to make their life complete.”Usually I want to escape the convention of what is sexually appealing.

Today Miuccia Prada may be among the world’s most respected fashion designers, but when Prada clothing was shown for the first time, it was subjected to more than its fair share of criticism.”I remember a review that described one of my first collections as ‘The Flintstones meet The Jacksons’,” she recalls, adding: “It was meant in a very negative way but, of course, that was exactly what I loved about it!”With this in mind, if the bickering between Prada and Bertelli is well-documented, it appears to be at its most fierce over the question of what is beautiful and/or sexy and/or commercial. Of course, I liked it a lot but I also wanted to do something more useful.” The resolution of these two sides of her character remains a driving force. Last year, Prada took the brave step of telling the Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s most respected daily newspapers, that her fellow countrywomen’s alarming habit of appearing on television wearing barely any clothes was “awful I call that look ‘the desperation of the sexy’. Instead, she studied political science at the Statale University, graduating in 1970, and mime at the Piccolo Teatro “It was an excuse not to talk,” she has said. “I’ve always been shy.” By then she had also, like many others of her generation, become a fully signed-up member of the Communist Party. “I was young in the Sixties, when Italian society was first becoming obsessed with consumerism, but my big dreams were of justice, equality and moral regeneration I was a Communist but being left wing was fashionable then. I was no different from thousands of middle-class kids.”By the mid-Seventies, she relented, entering the family business to oversee the design of accessories.