The Devil may have worn Prada, but now the devil is Prada, in the eyes of some kept ladies who lunch, anyway. Miuccia Prada to be precise, following her controversial remarks about women ‘s duty to themselves to be in the workplace their entire lifetimes and into their elder years, rather than sitting at home worrying about wrinkles. The Italian fashion designer who lives in the kind of understated Venetian opulence only the very rich can buy, and designs the sort of bag-lady-chic-vintagey fashion that only the kept ladies can afford, says she has no time for conversation with such women, also offending mothers who choose to do childrearing instead.
She has a point, though. Failed pension plans and an ageing population mean that many of us will be working past age 65 and if we’re lucky enough to be in jobs we enjoy, all the better. It’s when you’re children have grown and are becoming independent that you’re glad you kept working, even if you were earning barely enough to cover the childcare costs. Once your nest is emptying, you’ll appreciate having a career nest that keeps you engaged. Women who don’t work can’t be happy, says the mother of two sons in their 20s.
Never let a man financially support you, adds this unreformed 1970s feminist. With annual sales of €4.6 billion, that’s easy for her to say, but I do have to stick my neck out and agree with her. It must be darned hard work being a professional trophy wife of a well-off man who might leave you when you’re older for a newer model. All those grooming appointments and uplifting surgery are a modern pestilence. And to be basically a paid companion (someone else can raise the children) is a precarious situation indeed.
“People can have sex until they're 100,” Prada, told The Guardian. Embrace ugliness and ageing rather than obsessing about it, she extols, never wearing make-up and not really caring about making a style statement when she enters a room. “Ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting. . .the investigation of ugliness is more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty, Ugly is human,” she told The Telegraph.
The designer was 33 years old when she decided to stop worrying about her looks, preferring to be arty, intellectual (her Fondiazione Prada has opened yet another museum, this one in Venice). Because the population is ageing, people will eventually embrace it and even praise their elders’ vigour. “When each of us believes in ourselves, and feels good and beautiful and sexy and secure, that will be it,” she says. She’s an angel, really, to say so.
