Prada Expands Milan Flagship Into Eight-Level Luxury Hub

Silver-plated Prada handbags reworked by British artist Damien Hirst stood in the new underground tunnel on Tuesday. The Passaggio Segreto, or Secret Passage, now links Prada's previously separate menswear and womenswear stores beneath Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Italy's oldest active shopping arcade. In the same passage stood the Chandelier dress worn by Carey Mulligan in Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby.

The tunnel closed a gap. The women's boutique sits on the original site of Fratelli Prada, the leather-goods shop opened by brothers Mario and Martino Prada in 1913. The men's store stands across the central octagon of the Galleria, the glass-and-iron arcade designed in 1861 and built between 1865 and 1877 to connect the Duomo with La Scala. The Passaggio Segreto made the route continuous underground, and the preview placed the Hirst bags and the film costume along that path.

The bags and the dress stood at the start of a larger project. The complex that rises from the tunnel spans eight levels inside the Galleria and opens to the public on September 23, 2026. Pradasphere occupies the piano nobile. It is the first permanent exhibition dedicated to Prada. Drawing from the house’s archives, the floor brings together objects and material spanning fashion, art, architecture, film, culture and sport, including pieces displayed publicly for the first time, and traces the company’s evolution from 1913 through the present day. Beside the men’s store the complex joins Marchesi 1824, the historic Milanese pastry shop, so that café culture sits on the same route as the clothes and the archive.

Traveling editions of Pradasphere opened in London and Hong Kong in 2014 and in Shanghai in 2023. Those temporary shows carried the house’s archive from one city to the next. The version fixed in the Galleria is the first built to remain in one place. Prada Group bought Marchesi 1824 in 2014. The pastry shop opened its counter at the Galleria location in September 2016, its third site in the city. Three months later Osservatorio Fondazione Prada began its own programming higher in the same arcade. The two arrivals made hospitality and contemporary visual research permanent neighbors of the boutiques well before the new underground link joined everything into one complex.

The floors above grow more selective. The Studio consists of salon-style rooms created for personalised shopping by appointment, built around a larger hall that can also hold private events. An invitation-only apartment is set aside for dinners and special occasions. Uppermost is Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, which extends the foundation’s cultural programming into the arcade. The space is dedicated to visual experimentation and research, exploring how technology and contemporary culture reshape artistic expression and visual languages.

Miuccia Prada, who has directed the brand’s design since taking control in 1978 with Patrizio Bertelli, said the project asks how the brand’s history and its wider creative dialogue can be made visible in one place. Their son Lorenzo Bertelli, the Prada Group’s head of corporate social responsibility, called finding the balance between heritage and momentum one of the project’s hardest problems. A brand’s history should help it engage with the present, he said, rather than become an exercise in celebration for its own sake.

Andrea Guerra, Prada’s chief executive, set out the rationale plainly. “It is a way to show our DNA, our roots, our way of thinking and point of view,” he said. Prada’s total group sales totalled €5.7 billion last year. The company did not disclose the renovation cost. The work arrives as luxury houses turn their attention to the wealthiest clients, shoppers who continue to spend while broader demand across the sector softens, and as demand has also been shifting toward experiences.

“The ‘experiential’ part of the store, the part where we host our clients, has become more important,” Guerra said. He pointed not only to private spaces for receiving clients but also to venues such as Prada Caffè. “We have opened ‘apartments’ in many cities around the world and we will certainly open them in the world’s top 25 capitals,” he said. Milan now places that same format at the brand’s original address.

While those spaces host the wealthiest clients, Prada still means to draw aspirational buyers who may be making a first purchase, with items sold at entry-level prices it intends to keep relatively stable. “Our goal is to offer entry-level prices that do not come as a surprise, while leveraging the product’s exclusivity, customisation and craftsmanship to expand the price spectrum (further up the scale),” Guerra said.

Prada expects the complex to generate €100 million in annual revenue.