This season, with the shows of the collections for spring 2005 concluding on Oct. 3, one would be hard-pressed to find another Italian designer who comes close to having the creative influence and cultural impact that Ms. Prada exerts.
A mercurial, contradictory and shrewd woman in her early 50's, an informed art patron, a doting mother, a tempestuous employer, she is also a typical baby boomer whose early training as a political scientist may, as it turns out, be the most revealing element of her design résumé.
"At the moment Prada is totally monumental," Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale's, said after Prada's show on Sept. 29. "She leads everyone."
Mr. Ruttenstein's is anything but a minority view. "Everyone else is doing Prada and everything else looks old next to her," said Elizabeth Saltzman, the fashion director of Vanity Fair. And as early as the New York shows for spring, which ended two weeks ago, it was clear that designers would have to work hard to keep Ms. Prada's kooky but persuasive design sense from getting inside their heads.
"New York belonged to Prada," said Robert Burke, the fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, referring to a season in which the runway shows of one designer after another paid Ms. Prada what could politely be termed homage.
Well before Ms. Prada showed her own new ideas for spring, other designers were making reference, conscious or otherwise, to her catalog. One could detect Prada in Behnaz Sarafpour's shibori print dresses in New York; in the stylized huaraches Tomas Maier showed for Bottega Veneta in Milan; in Consuelo Castiglioni's use of feathers, beads and full skirts here at Marni; and in the overall Old Maid eccentricity of styling that drifted through collections as disparate as those of Tommy Hilfiger, Blumarine and Derek Lam.
"I told Miuccia today, `You're the only reason we all come to Milan,' " Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, said on Sept. 30 from her front-row perch at the Gucci show, where the future of one luxury goods house was being staked on the abilities of a former Tom Ford assistant to hold onto a particular sexed-up and indolent consumer, who gives the appearance of rarely having to pay for her own clothes.
"She has become the lifeblood of the city," Ms. Wintour added, referring to Ms. Prada. The opinion carries extra weight when one considers that the frenzied cycle of Milan Fashion Week encompasses no fewer than 219 collections presented over nine days.
It may not even be an exaggeration to suggest that Ms. Prada has become one of Italy's major cultural exports.
With the possible exception of the culinary Slow Food movement and the works of the excoriating, ubiquitous social commentator and novelist Aldo Busi, not much coming out of Italy these days is a fraction as entertaining, worldly or socially adroit as Ms. Prada's work.
The reasons, while hardly mysterious, are simple to synopsize. Unlike all but a handful of those consecrated to the pincushion religion, Miuccia Prada is an intellectual.
Since when does wattage have anything to do with dressmaking, one might ask? Well, it doesn't really. But only those who have experienced the fathomless hell of the crackbrained stories most designers come up with to account for inspiration ("I was thinking Heidi meets Charlotte Rampling in `The Damned' and then all of them go on vacation with Shrek") can fully appreciate Ms. Prada's brand of hard-headed consciousness
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"Nostalgia is a very complicated subject for me," Ms. Prada said in an interview. "I'm attracted by nostalgia but I refuse it intellectually," she explained. "It interests me to be modern, and so I refuse nostalgia, but still I have it. So you see contradictions and oppositions are maybe what makes the work contemporary, because nowadays we are all composed of opposites."
It is exactly her comfort with opposition that makes Ms. Prada an engaging designer, her knack for combining elements high and low, for pairing unlikely fabrics, for pushing the boundaries of textile technology both to extend the parameters of design and to ape the effects of centuries-old handicrafts on a mass-produced scale.
Presented by anyone less assured, the paste brooches and feather hats and other anachronisms Ms. Prada has put back into currency would look like a joke.
"Miuccia listens, she receives information, she doesn't isolate herself in a palazzo like so many Milanese designers with their bodyguards," said Ms. Wintour.
In her show on Sept. 29, which drew a mixed response among some retailers and was almost universally popular with members of the press, she amalgamated influences as liberally and with as much loopy brio as the musicians from the great new New York band TV on the Radio.
She drew from nature (feather prints), from the New York School poets (patent leather Frank O'Hara loafers), from UPS carriers (sexy knee-length shorts) and from Rastafarianism (domed caps that simultaneously evoked the followers of Haile Selassie and the large brained aliens from "The Twilight Zone.") She drew on a palette that it would be courteous to call odd. And yet, even in her color sense, Ms. Prada flouts stale ideas about propriety and taste. "At this point, she probably owns brown and blue," Mr. Burke of Bergdorf's said
In less confident hands the whole conceit of Ms. Prada's recent presentations might easily collapse in on themselves. Yet for this viewer at least, a Prada show remains all the justification necessary to persist in believing that fashion is still made in Milan.
"Maybe in the past couple years fashion has become separate from reality," Ms. Prada said. "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."
She called to add a coda by phone. "I want to make clothes that are beautiful of course," she said, "but also clothes that are interesting and considered and intelligent and not out of place."
and Miuccia have done) Oh! and am I the only one who thinks that assymetry was quite an issue in this collection???
. I am with you Spike. I miss the other stuff (especially that gorgeous lipstick print)! 
walks
cute Prada dress! ANy others? There is one from the same collection worn by Jennifer Aniston in magazines everywhere. I am searching for this dress!! HELP!!
