“This Is Where Everything Started for Prada”: Lorenzo Bertelli on the New Prada Galleria

On Tuesday, Prada will preview its newest — and oldest — store.

This typically paradoxical Prada position is thanks to that store’s location: Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. It was here that the company, founded in 1913 and originally called Fratelli Prada, opened its first-ever point of sale. More than a century later, Prada is unveiling an expansion of that original site — most recently used exclusively as a womenswear boutique — into an eight-floor complex encompassing womenswear and menswear, food, art, private hospitality and, for the first time on a permanent basis, an exhibition dedicated to Prada itself.

From its first Milanese store opened by brothers Mario and Martino Prada, Prada has grown into a global fashion business with 423 directly operated boutiques and reported group revenues of €5.7 billion last year. Since the late 1970s, Mario’s granddaughter, Miuccia Prada, and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, have driven that growth. Now, Prada is turning its eye for expansion towards its origin story.

The new development is christened Prada Galleria after the arcade it sits within: a Milan landmark that, on September 22, will host the 2026 installment of Vogue World. The Galleria, completed in 1877, was built to connect two established poles of Milanese life — devotion, represented by the Duomo, and culture, by La Scala — with an indoor thoroughfare dedicated to a newer preoccupation: shopping.

The Prada store front located in The Galleria, Milan.

Photo: Courtesy of Prada

The enlarged and redefined Prada space links several pre-existing elements. The historic womenswear site will be merged with the existing menswear boutique via an underground tunnel the company is tantalizingly calling the Passaggio Segreto, or Secret Passage. Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, inaugurated in December 2016 and dedicated to artistic curation, occupies the uppermost levels. Marchesi 1824, the historic Milanese pasticceria Prada Group acquired in 2014, has operated its Galleria outpost here since September 2016 and will be subsumed into the larger Prada complex.

The architectural strategy of expansion through connection reflects the project’s brand-building strategy. The piano nobile, first-floor space of the original store site will now house a new Pradasphere display, the first permanent exhibition devoted to the house. Tracing the company’s history from the founding of Fratelli Prada, it is designed to connect Prada’s lesser-known origin story with its more celebrated recent history.

Underground, meanwhile, the Passaggio Segreto will, the company says, display lesser-known episodes and objects from the archive: early experiments and obscure “firsts” intended to reveal continuities within Prada that were previously either unknown or overlooked. Above, the invitation-only Appartamento has been conceived under Miuccia Prada’s direction as a hypothetical domestic space: a glimpse into her interior aesthetic.