Prada Galleria opens eight-floor fashion and art destination in Milan

PRADA BUILDS UP, AND DOWN

Prada has expanded its historic presence inside Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II into an eight-floor universe of retail, hospitality, art and archive. Named Prada Galleria, the project occupies the site where Fratelli Prada first opened in 1913, stretching vertically through the 19th-century arcade and, crucially, beneath it. A new subterranean passage now connects the Prada Donna and Prada Uomo stores across the Galleria’s central octagon, turning two addresses into a single destination — because, apparently, crossing the arcade at street level was no longer quite ambitious enough.

Developed under the direction of Miuccia Prada, the complex brings together more than a century of the house’s history without attempting to freeze it into a conventional brand museum. Opening to the public on September 23, Prada Galleria instead frames the house’s identity as something accumulated through encounters with architecture, art, cinema, culture and sports. The result mixes expanded boutiques with archival exhibitions, Milanese pastry, private salons and spaces devoted to contemporary art, forming a kind of vertical self-portrait in which shopping is only one part of the itinerary.

Prada Galleria unfolds across eight floors in Milan | all images courtesy of Prada

THE ARCHIVE GETS A SECRET PASSAGE

At ground level and below, the original Prada Donna store has been expanded underground, nearly doubling its display space. Alongside the women’s collections, the renewed boutique includes larger areas for travel, home and beauty, set among historic murals and archival objects. Diagonally opposite, Prada Uomo joins the network through the new underground connection, physically stitching the two stores together beneath one of Milan’s most familiar public interiors.

That connection is known, with appropriate theatricality, as the Passaggio Segreto. Rather than functioning purely as circulation, the tunnel hosts an exhibition of lesser-known episodes from Prada’s history, focusing on early experiments and company ‘firsts’ that anticipated its long-running interest in collaboration and cultural cross-pollination. Above the Uomo store, Marchesi 1824 continues the journey with its very Milanese answer to cultural immersion: pastry. One floor higher, Pradasphere becomes the first permanent exhibition devoted to Prada, gathering archival artifacts and material spanning its 1913 origins to the present, following previous temporary editions staged in London and Hong Kong in 2014 and Shanghai in 2023.

the project occupies Prada’s historic home in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II

FROM PRIVATE SALONS TO VISUAL EXPERIMENTS

The second floor shifts into a more private register. Studio is arranged as a sequence of intimate, salon-like rooms for personalized shopping by appointment, organized around a central hall that can host private events. Above, Appartamento imagines an 18th-century domestic interior populated by antique Italian furniture and contemporary photography. Andreas Gursky has curated an exhibition of his own works for the space, setting his large-scale images against an intentionally unlikely historical backdrop overlooking the monumental mosaics of the Galleria. The apartment is invitation-only and conceived for private dinners and special occasions, blurring the already rather porous line between boutique, gallery and home.

At the uppermost levels, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada completes the complex with a space dedicated to visual experimentation at the intersection of technology, contemporary culture and artistic expression. Together, the eight floors turn Prada’s original Milan address into less a flagship than an ecosystem, moving from fashion to archives, cakes to Gursky, private dining to image research without ever properly leaving the building. Prada Galleria ultimately treats the house’s history not as a sequence to be displayed behind glass, but as a set of rooms, passages and encounters visitors can physically move through.

Marchesi 1824 brings Milanese café culture into the complex