By Laia Garcia-Furtado
Nylon backpacks, ugly chic, celebrities, ‘intellectual fashion’, the decade that one fashion label redefined fashion – welcome to Prada in the Nineties.
RRP £18.99 • 05 November 2026 (UK) RRP: $24.95 • November 10 2026 (US) Published by Batsford
Prada in the nineties is BACK, with many of their clothes influencing fashion trends today (capris, anyone?). This fully illustrated guide examines Prada in its transformative era, looking at the collections, the advertising, the impact and the story.
Whether you are a fashion devotee, or you simply know Prada as what the devil wears, the label has moved beyond high fashion, and become part of contemporary culture, as people track down its clothes on resale websites and obsessively discuss new and old collections.
While Prada is not the only designer label that has achieved this feat, it may be the only one to have done so while making clothes that are often described as ‘intellectual’. One Prada slip dress, worn by Uma Thurman at the 1995 Academy Awards, is so famous it has its own Wikipedia page.
Taking the leather-goods company founded by her grandfather in 1913 and turning it into one of the biggest fashion companies in the world, Miuccia Prada would hit an unprecedented stride just ten years after launching her first womenswear collection in 1988, with clothes that captured precisely the zeitgeist; that defied all other trends, bucked the norms of good taste, of beauty, of propriety, but also elevated a new kind of womanhood and a new kind of femininity that could live in tension with itself.
Prada in the Nineties is the story of this decade, this label, and how one fashion house changed the game.
This is the first in a series, with the next titles being YSL in the Seventies and Versace in the Eighties.