News Article Mashup

Clients for experiment 3

The beauty of power


Barack Obama


Madonna Louise Ciccone


Miuccia Prada

Obama/Madonna/Prada

No designer is as diffident as Miuccia Prada about her métier. At the crucial moment — the astonishing onset of the financial crisis — it was Prada's gut steadiness that won the public's trust, and her engagement with the mutating outlines of class that make her one of Italy’s most compelling cultural exports.

Ms. Prada has cemented her reputation as a cultural lightning rod with her eccentric and unconventional uses of pattern, shape and (often high-tech) fabrics. The first female icon to completely control her design and image, Prada "opened the door for what women could achieve and were permitted to do." Her avid explorations into pop cultural realms few designers navigated as boldly and her provocative relationship to the traditional markers of femininity in dress. The steadiness of her temperament and the judicious quality of decision-making, are her best-known qualities.

The most important decision she has made — to bewitch fashion insiders and the public (Prada had revenues of over $2 billion in 2005) through aggressive aesthetic experimentation — was done carefully, with an exhaustive attention to detail and contemplation of all the possible angles. The furor only solidified her global domination.

But not every decision can be made so carefully. There are a thousand instinctive, instantaneous decisions that a designer has to make in the course of a design. learned to trust her instincts is one of the techniques she has used to accomplish this. Her outspoken ambivalence about fashion is another. She made people cringe but also think differently about female designers. Her role as a provocateur changed boundaries for ensuing generations. She was a one-woman reality show.


Reference:

Edna Gundersen, 2008, Pop icons at 50: Madonna, USA Today, Life
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2008-08-14-madonna_N.htm

Joe Klein, 2008, Why Barack Obama Is Winning, Time, Oct. 22, Polictics
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1853025,00.html

Miuccia Prada, The New York Times, Times topics, people
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/p/miuccia_prada/index.html?scp=4&sq=prada&st=cse