Miuccia Prada to receive Outstanding Achievement Award

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Nov 26, 2018

Miuccia Prada will be the recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award for 2018, given by the British Fashion Council (BFC) in partnership with Swarovski.
 
Miuccia will be honored on Monday December 10 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, for her outstanding contribution to the global fashion industry, the latest highlight in a remarkable career where the house of Prada has arguably been the single most influential fashion brand of this century.

 Previous winners of the Outstanding Achievement Award include Donatella Versace, Ralph Lauren and Karl Lagerfeld. Miuccia Prada has also won the 2004 International Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America; and the inaugural BFC International Designer of the Year in 2013. One year later, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York dedicated its annual exhibition to her and Elsa Schiaparelli, entitled "Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations."
 
“We are thrilled to be honoring Miuccia Prada with the Outstanding Achievement Award for being an incredible design maverick and for spearheading the evolution of the Prada group from a family business to a global brand,” said Caroline Rush, CEO of the British Fashion Council.

While Nadja Swarovski, member of the Swarovski Executive Board commented: “Miuccia Prada is unquestionably one of the most influential designers in fashion history. A true visionary, her dedication to fashion as an art form is endlessly inspirational.”
 
As part of their continued a support of The Fashion Awards 2018, Swarovski has pledged a £300,000 donation to the BFC Education Foundation. Last year, the BFC raised over £2.2 million for its charities and business support initiatives. 

 
Miuccia Prada became creative director of her family’s  fashion brand four decades ago, going onto to create a new paradigm in fashion - a brand that mingled haute luxury, avant-garde design and  artistic input without ever co-branding with any specific artist – unlike practically all the brands that mimicked Prada’s corporate model.
 
Under the direction of Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli, a modest leather goods business grew into a fashion powerhouse, floated on the Hong Kong stock market in June 2011 with a market capitalization of £8 billion. While her signature industrial black nylon backpack became the emblem of a new category of independent, highly fashionable feminists. From her acclaimed debut catwalk in 1988, Prada has staged more than 100 shows, becoming  one of the bellwether shows for predicting the future of fashion.
 
In between, she developed the most widely respected contemporary art museum of any luxury marque, the Fondazione Prada. Opening it in 1993 in Milan, before moving to Venice in 2011, inside the Ca’ Corner della Regina palace overlooking the Grand Canal. Then, in  2015, moving back to Milan and a one-century-year old, 19,000 square-meter factory in Largo Isarco, re-envisioned by Rem Koolhaas.