this is a heart-shaped email

for you... and my dear Miuccia. ♥

Feb 14, 2024

Ciao guys,

I hope you’re doing amazing, especially on this day full of love!

As matter of a fact, here I come with a special dedicated to Saint Valentine’s. I wanted to write something like this for a while now and told myself there’s no better day than today to dedicate a love letter to my beloved Miuccia Prada (or more of a stalker analysis of her persona?!).

So, please Miuccia, will you be my valentine? I will wait for you at our spot in Quadronno until they won’t send me away…

Jokes aside, I hope you enjoy it. I added a special recipe to share with your loved ones. It’s a dark chocolate fudgy cake – and most importantly gluten-free – that originated in Capri.

Hear you soon, I send you aaaall my love.

Yours truly
♡

Coffee caprese cake (20 cm cake pan, perfect if heart-shaped):

Ingredients

☆ 100 gr. butter + extra to grease

☆ 140 gr. dark chocolate

☆ 130 gr. castor sugar

☆ 2 tbsp espresso powder (substitutes: 2 tbsp of instant coffee or 1.5 of espresso coffee grounded with mortar and pestle)

☆ 150 gr. ground almonds

☆ 3 eggs

☆ 1 pinch of salt

☆ Confectioners sugar or flaky salt to decorate

Optional: Orange zest

Instructions

★ In a small saucepan, melt the butter and chocolate over low heat. Once completely melted, stir in the espresso powder and set aside. In the meantime grease the cake pan, line it with baking paper and pre-heat the static oven at 180° C.

★ Separate the whites from the yolks in two bowls. In the first one whisk the yolks together with half of the sugar (and the orange zest if you want to) until it has turned into a pale yellow frothy mixture. Gently fold the melted chocolate into the yolk, then add the ground almonds and stir until obtaining a dense batter.

★ In the second bowl beat the whites with the remaining sugar until frothy. Once dense and stable, incorporate the whites into the chocolate mixture carefully, following a down-to-upwards motion. The batter should result in a luscious, voluminous mixture.

★ Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake it for 30/35 minutes. The top of the cake should be dry, the rest should feel firm to the touch with a moist core. To test its doneness, do the toothpick trick. It probably won’t be completely clean as it has a slightly fudgy core, but the texture should be on the crumblier side. Not wet nor dry.

★ When it’s ready, take it out of the oven. Leave to cool for at least 30 minutes in the pan. Don’t remove it immediately from the tin, otherwise it will crackle. Once tepid, with a knife release the cake from the sides of the pan and flip it.

★ Decorate the cake as you prefer. Either with powdered sugar or flaky salt. Even additional orange zest could work. Enjoy it with your partner, your loved ones or on your own.

My mom passed me down the passion for Prada. I remember playing dress up with her Prada clothes and admiring the beautiful pink boxes of Miu Miu shoes, whenever I had to put on my little sneakers to go to school. The truth is that there’s something that always had me drawn to Miuccia. Probably, it’s connected to the same approach we have towards life, which translates so smoothly in the way she makes clothes. This radical attachment to being subversive, the opposite of what people expect, yet the strong despise for whatever is conventionally pretty and banal. There are few things she truly appreciates – provocation, acid green and miniskirts – but many she strongly dislikes, particularly the obvious and the bourgeoisie.

Miuccia was always like that. Since when she was a member of the Italian Communist Party fighting for women's rights in YSL heels and Pierre Cardin coats. “I was so embarrassed when I was young,” she affirmed. “To be a leftist feminist and doing fashion, I felt so horrible and so ashamed.” Nonetheless, she wanted to be different from everybody else. “If everybody is in short, I do long; if everybody’s in long, I do short. And that is the part about fashion that I like a lot.”

The culture has been always rooted in Miuccia’s core in complete synergy with her avid curiosity. She was an afecionado of the theatre studying mime at the Piccolo Teatro for five years. And grew up going to the movies – even three times a day – influenced by the great Italian and French cinema from the 60s.
Since her passion for fashion prevailed over the one for politics, her main goal was to understand and transmit a sense of culture through her collections. It’s all linked to this necessity to get to the bottom of every interest and doubt swirling in her head. “If you see, you read, you watch movies, and you are interested, you become instinctively connected to the world,” She said. “I’m interested in people. What can I do that is useful to people?”

She spent her teenage years polishing the art of personal style on 360. Cinema, arts, books, all the things Prada ponders and has to say are reflected in the concept of every new collection. With the first being the idea of “ugly chic”. A definition she’s not happy with but describes perfectly the obsession she had – and still has – against the idea of beauty and sexiness, which is radicated in our culture and was, in particular, at the start of her career.

At the time, fashion was, in general, a strict environment exclusively revolving around the idea of glamourous. On the other side, Miuccia and her urge to change the rules felt like bringing some elements of disturbance to this limbus of perfect femininity. Disturbing although perfectly normal. A subtle way to make simple and banal things purposefully wrong. Surely this approach to fashion didn’t come through at first glimpse and the consensus wasn’t there thus far. Indeed she stated that “When (she) started, everybody hated what (she) was doing except a few clever people! Because it was not for the classic ones. And for the super trendy avant-gardists, it was too classic”.

But isn’t this the place where Prada’s genius lies? In her attitude and will to avoid pleasing people. Her desire to, not only, steer clear of trends, but lead them. As if her designs were made to be considered unflattering, almost grotesque. For this particular reason, Miu Miu was born. With the sole purpose of being Miuccia’s artistic playground. “I thought that with Miu Miu I could be more radical, more avant-garde, more disruptive”. In 1997, she stated that “Prada, at the end, is what I am, and Miu Miu is what I would like to be.”

Left: Alasdair McLellan for W Magazine, 2023 / Right: Miuccia in her apartment with a Fontana painting

In the end, Miuccia is always looking for something unseen. She’s not made to dictate the present and agree on what is popular right now. She has such a nose to detect what will be popular years from now. It all comes from the persistence to make clothes with a purpose. And that purpose it’s to enhance the personality of each. Or, at least, helping them find their own. “One of the reasons I started doing clothes was because I couldn’t find anything to wear”, she said.
In this optic, she built her vision around the idea of a uniform, inspired by the diversified stimuli of the everyday life of each person, let it be a nun or a sex worker. Giving a free pass to be quirky and whimsical even if wearing a uniform or a classical look.

The Uniform

“Once, she was standing in the studio in this very prim, calf-length, pleated white dress, and you could see straight through it to her electric pink underwear. I don’t know if she knew it was transparent or not, but that mixture of being sober and conservative and then something quite shocking is totally Prada and totally her. It’s an unseen sexiness that’s completely instinctive.” - Katie Grand.

**Miuccia Prada by Amit Israeli for Vogue**

Neon pink and acid green. Or better, “Miuccia Sludge”, as Alexander Fury defined it.
Neon colours have been the main players in Miuccia’s palette with no exception. Especially the acid green, since it debuted on the runway in 1996. It’s incredible how these loud colours blend perfectly with her vision, making the way she styles her pieces never prosaic. She simply has fun with neon colours, as well as prints, metallics, fringes, and sequins, but in a sort of solemn way.

The statement necklace.
Apparently, Miuccia has one of the most beautiful jewellery collections in Europe and I don’t find it too hard to believe. She’s always been a lover of vintage pieces, and this passion is connected to the story behind the precedent ownership. As if she could wear the same aura as the previous owner. That’s why, in the most contradictory context ever, you can see her rocking a huge, almost distracting, necklace. It can be with a masculine golf, a cardigan, a shirt or a simple t-shirt to break the austere tone of the outfit and blur the lines between formal and casual.

The armcuffs.
Those bangles worn as armcuffs have been sitting on her arms forever. If you noticed they’ve always been the same ones, with their place, sitting on the left arm. The golden bangle is embellished with precious stones and brings a slightly byzantine vibe to the outfit. I remember it at the Met in 2012 or at the finale of Miu Miu’s 2019 Cruise show. The platinum diamond coordinated bracelets (pictured above), belong to the Art Déco era – 20s, 30s – and they hardly are worn singularly.

The headband.

This is a detail that she’s often seen wearing and that she brings on the catwalk too. I mean, we all know the infamous Prada headband.

The midi skirt.
Even if la Signora is in love with miniskirts, which reckons she can’t wear due to her age, she wears frequently skirts. Sometimes A-shaped, but never not midi. Even better with a touch of plissé, which became a staple of Prada, since they’ve been introduced in the AW ‘98 collection. The creases – literally “a cassetto”, in English “drawer like” – are made to resemble the ones of the clothes when folded roughly and put carelessly in the drawer. If she’s not wearing a skirt, then it’s a coat with the same length. Or…

The PJs.

A choice made with elegance and comfort in mind. Quoting Miuccia: “I always thought that you should be able to go out for a party, but also take your children to school, and never feel ashamed of what you are wearing,” And also: “I don’t want to change myself according to what I have to do, or for different society planes. Because […] I would have felt uncomfortable if I would change my way of dressing.”

The “self hug”.
Her peculiar posture, both in pictures or at the end of the show, is a mix of shyness, dignity and assertiveness. With her hands grasping her chest, they are often used as a styling tool to hold half-opened coats or foulards.