Prada opens eight-floor Galleria flagship fusing retail, hotel-style hospitality and art in Milan
The project links the brand's men's and women's stores through a new underground passage and puts a permanent Prada museum above a 1824 pastry shop.
Prada opens to the public on 23 September a new flagship called Prada Galleria, spread across eight floors of retail, hospitality and art inside Milan's 19th-century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The project connects the brand's existing men's and women's stores, on opposite sides of the arcade's central octagon, through a newly built subterranean passage.
Why the site matters
The Galleria is where Prada began. Construction of the arcade started in 1865, and it houses the site of the original Fratelli Prada boutique, opened in 1913 by Mario Prada. Miuccia Prada said the project asks how the brand's history and its wider creative dialogue can be made visible in one place.
Lorenzo Bertelli, the Prada Group's head of corporate social responsibility and Miuccia Prada's son, called finding the balance between heritage and momentum one of the project's hardest problems. He said a brand's history should help it engage with the present rather than become, in his words, an exercise in celebration for its own sake.
What is inside the eight floors
The women's store has been renewed with an expanded below-ground level that nearly doubles its display space, adding room for travel, home and beauty ranges alongside historic murals and archival objects. The men's store, open since July 2013, now links to it through an underground tunnel called the Secret Passage, which carries an exhibition of lesser-known moments from Prada's history.
Above the pastry shop and restaurant Marchesi 1824, on the piano nobile, is Pradasphere, the first permanent exhibition dedicated to Prada, covering its history from 1913 to the present. Marchesi was acquired by Prada Group in 2014 and opened at the Galleria in September 2016, its third Milan location.
Pradasphere follows earlier travelling versions of the exhibition staged in London and Hong Kong in 2014 and in Shanghai in 2023, and can be viewed after registering. Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, dedicated to contemporary photography and visual art, opened in the Galleria in December 2016, three months after Marchesi.
An invitation-only space called the Appartamento pairs contemporary art with antique Italian furniture for private dinners and special occasions. German photographic artist Andreas Gursky has curated an exhibition of his works there.
On the second floor, the Studio offers salon-style rooms for personalised shopping by appointment, built around a central hall used for private events. Together with the Appartamento, it extends Prada Galleria beyond conventional retail into spaces built for a small number of clients rather than passing footfall.
A format Prada has built before
Prada Galleria continues a format the brand pioneered with its first Epicenter, opened on Broadway in New York in 2001 and designed by Rem Koolhaas and his studio OMA, notable for a 60-metre unobstructed north wall running the length of a city block. Epicenters followed in Los Angeles and Tokyo, designed respectively by Koolhaas with Ole Scheeren and by Herzog & de Meuron.
In Shanghai, Prada opened MiShang Prada Rong Zhai at the end of March last year with director Wong Kar Wai, its first stand-alone fine dining space in Asia, alongside a pastry shop, café, study, lounge, dining room and a terrace reimagining a historic open-air lounge. Executive chef Riccardo La Perna runs the kitchen there.
Prada restored the Rong Zhai 1918 mansion in Shanghai as a cultural hub in 2017, and opened a Prada Caffè at its new ION Orchard boutique in Singapore in December 2024. The Galleria project extends that hospitality strategy to the brand's founding city for the first time on this scale.
What we have already covered on the group
We have written that the Bertelli-Prada family kept its group to five brands for over two decades, betting concentrated focus beats the acquisition pace of LVMH and Kering, as detailed in our guide to the brands behind Prada Group. Miu Miu's retail sales jumped 93.2% in 2024, crossing one billion euros.
The group's one recent departure from that discipline was its acquisition of Versace, completed in December 2025 for 1.25 billion euros, roughly 40% less than Capri Holdings paid for the house in 2018. We covered how that deal reunited two Milanese houses under one family-controlled owner, as we detailed in looking at who owns Versace.
Capri Holdings, formerly Michael Kors Holdings, retains Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo after selling Versace, having earlier seen its planned merger with Tapestry collapse in November 2024 when the FTC blocked the deal in court, as we set out in our piece on the luxury brands Capri Holdings owns.
Prada Galleria arrives without a comparable acquisition attached to it. It is a bricks-and-mortar bet on Prada's own name and Milan address rather than a portfolio move, opening during Milan Fashion Week when the industry's attention, buyers and press are already concentrated in the city.
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