Inside Prada’s Newly Expanded Milan Flagship, Complete With an Underground Passage

Yesterday, Prada held its Spring/Summer 2027 womenswear show within a futuristic setting. Held inside the brand’s headquarters at the Fondazione Prada, models walked over rows upon rows of tubular fluorescent lights, as guests sat on translucent benches seemingly suspended over a clear floor. But despite the modernity, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons focused on the brand’s heritage.

“Here, there is inherent beauty found in the survey of the familiar—in asking how many forms a known thing might assume, how man different possibilities may exist within,” stated the show notes. Today, the brand is applying that same logic to a place a bit more traditional and familiar—Prada’s first address in Milan—with the expansion of its historic Galleria boutique.

The store is in a prime location, the highly photographed crux of one of Milan’s most famous buildings. Stop by at any moment and tourists will likely have their phones on the ground, snapping pictures right in front of the Prada doors.

The new eight-floor project emphasizes elements of the brand beyond clothing. It brings together retail, hospitality, art, and more than a century of company history beneath the glass dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, where the brand founder, Mario Prada, opened Fratelli Prada in 1913. For the first time, a new underground passage, the Passaggio Segreto, connects the Prada Donna and Prada Uomo stores on opposite sides of the arcade. The corridor also presents an exhibition of the lesser-known episodes from Prada’s past, including early experiments and collaborations.

That’s just one clue that this new space is more than a store: it’s a museum, a café, and a private residence. The Prada-owned beloved Milan landmark Marchesi 1824 offers snacks and respite from shopping, while the invitation-only Appartamento is almost like a Prada-clad home. (It’s a reimagining of an eighteenth-century apartment, featuring antique Italian furniture alongside contemporary photographs chosen by one of Mrs. Prada’s favorite artists, Andreas Gursky.)

Upstairs, the Studio provides appointment-only rooms for private shopping and made-to-measure services, while at the top of the building, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada explores photography, technology, and new forms of image-making.

On the piano nobile, or the second floor of the Galleria, is the “Pradasphere,” a new space featuring a permanent exhibition that gathers clothing, photographs, documents, and other artifacts from the Prada archive, many of them on public view for the first time. It traces the company’s evolution from a Milanese leather-goods shop into a brand whose interests extend across art, architecture, cinema, culture, and sport. While an earlier version of the exhibit traveled to London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, it now finally lands at the address where the story began.

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