Elle Tipton Designer Handbags

The Best Classic Prada Bags of All Time

Nine times out of ten, getting a Prada handbag is going to be a good fashion investment. Today, the vast majority of these bags look really nice, are versatile and are trendy additions to your wardrobe. But there are three special bags that Prada has made that are going to stand the test of time and that you going to just keep on carrying season after season, and year after year.

So, what are the best Prada handbags? These are purses that women can carry them around because they are versatile, made of high-quality materials and trendy. Having become one of the world’s leading fashion designers out of circumstance rather than choice, Miuccia Prada is considered more peculiar and unconventional than many of her contemporaries. She enjoys creating a paradox in her work by combining opposites, whether that refers to stylistic oppositions or the placement of the old with the new, or careful and artful construction with spontaneous pastiche.

A remarkably educated woman with a doctorate in political science, Miuccia Prada inherited her grandfather’s leather goods company in the mid 1970s. The actual Prada Company had been founded in 1913 by Mario Prada and was the luggage maker of choice to the Milanese gentry.

Miuccia created the first nylon bag in 1978, and the classic simple, black nylon knapsacks with the silver-metal Prada name were presented in 1984. These became a cult item among fashion followers, and a style icon of the 1990s. The go inadvertently launched the craze for fashion labels to produce signature bags of their own.

Perhaps somewhat surprised by her initial good results, Prada presented her first ready-to-wear collection in 1988. Considering her active commitment to political discussion and debate, it is not surprising that her design work was considered unconventional: it often embraced retro styling with offbeat color and pattern combinations and widely used both high-tech and old-fashioned materials.

Prada has, in various collections, combined stilettos with thick wool socks, fur helmets along with cocktail dresses and tiaras with work clothes. She has described her designs variously as ‘uniforms for the slightly disenfranchised’ (the term given to her first collection) and as bad taste, ‘I don’t make elegant clothes anymore, but the opposite. I make unattractive clothes from ugly material.’

Techno styles make use of industrial materials and can express an industrial aesthetic, which in itself demonstrates cultural values. Prada’s comment suggests that she is presenting buyers with a choice – a freedom to choose their own aesthetic. The girl’s dresses decorated with celluloid strips defy convention, even her own conventions, thereby introducing an element of self-reflexivity into her pattern practice.

Prada’s spirited and experimental fashions have a wide appeal in the twenty-first century, as they serve a purpose far larger than just adornment. Often drawing on the military uniform, like both Gucci and Dolce and Gabbana she exploits the erotic good thing about sartorial militarism.

An inadvertent trend setter, like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, Prada commissioned Pritzker Prize awarded architects Rem Koolhaas to design the New York and Los Angeles flagship stores – called Prada Epicenter – which were opened in 2001 and 2004 respectively, and Herzog and de Meuron to design another, in Tokyo, in 2003.