The Flâneur Wears Prada
Miuccia, Menswear, and the Silhouette of the Intellectual Gentleman
Charvet was worn by Charles Baudelaire, Attolini by Jep Gambardella, and Brioni by Marcello Rubini. Whether the first modernist poet or the journalist of a decadent Eternal City, both wanderers of modern life and its glittering metropolis observed, critiqued, and experienced it all. One thing they never dismissed was the way they presented themselves. Because you must admit, strolling along La Seine in a double-cuff shirt or wandering down Via Veneto in a black wool-silk suit is a romance in motion.
Walter Benjamin, the German thinker of the 20th century, once wrote, “The flâneur is the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city.”
I would argue that the flâneur is a byproduct of modernism itself, born of the nonconformist mind — an individual attuned to awareness, curiosity, and a quiet rebelliousness, yet without the desire for destruction. All of which can be gathered under the name intellectual.
The truth seeker stands at the core of what it means to be an intellectual. The title has nothing to do with degrees, honors, or the number of books one has read. Its virtue lies in honesty, autonomy, and understanding: to see the world, to stand at its center, yet remain detached from it.
It is this very posture that gave Baudelaire his place as the first modernist of humanity and lent Jep Gambardella, in La Grande Bellezza (2013), the tragic charm of a man reigning over the ruins of modern Rome. Both sought truth over comfort, understanding over conformity, freedom of mind over tribal allegiance.
Though often expressed in literature or cinema, the ideal of the autonomous truth seeker—what might be called philosophy in the name of the flâneur—finds one of its most fascinating expressions in fashion.
In the 1970s, the prestigious Milanese leather house Prada underwent a transformation that forever changed its path. Miuccia Prada, granddaughter of Mario Prada, the conservative founder who once declared that “no woman should run a company” (and thankfully, his son had no interest in doing so), took over and began to treat the brand as a canvas for her intellectual imagination.
Armed with a Ph.D. in political science, a past in the Italian Communist Party, and years of mime training at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, Signora Prada embodied everything that seemed alien to the fashion establishment. Yet those very contradictions became the foundation of Prada’s modern empire.
Like the intellectual pursuit itself—the search for truth regardless of convention—Miuccia approached every creation as a statement of principle. The 1984 nylon luxury bag, the women’s collections that merged uniform discipline with couture finesse, or deconstructed couture into minimalist, utilitarian elegance, all testified to her restless inquiry. The same philosophy shaped the menswear line that debuted in 1995.
High armholes, full canvassing, exquisite fabrics sculpted through drape and structure; garments that read like scripture written upon the body, echoing the golden geometry of the Vitruvian Man. The idea of craftsmanship has long belonged to the sartorial world, the temple of tailoring.
Within this domain, among those versed in the savoir-faire of how a “great” jacket should appear, wearing a fashion label in tailored form was often considered heresy. That is precisely the dogma Prada dared to challenge, offering an alternative story.
As the millennium turned, menswear leaned hard into the slim and contemporary: clothes cut as close to the body as possible. But whoever began that movement, it certainly wasn’t Prada.
“Fashion only has value if it has meaning,” Miuccia once said, and for her, meaning always leads back to challenging the standard, seeking truth through nonconformity.
Just as she made “ugly” beautiful in the language of high fashion, her intellectual spirit seeped quietly into the design of this 2000s jacket I’ve come to admire so deeply.
For a long time, I was bound by the sacred codes of menswear: fastening only certain buttons, reserving black for evening wear. Then came knowledge, and with it the double-edged sword of knowing too much. My vision narrowed; I saw craftsmanship as the only grail that mattered. The jacket must be fully canvassed, made of natural fabric, with refined shoulder construction, high armholes, and hand-finished stitching.
Those things mean less to me now.
The idea of the flâneur, of the intellectual who views the world through a wider lens, has also taught me to view tailoring differently.
This black Prada jacket from the 2000s breaks nearly every rule of “great tailoring.” It’s black, half canvassed, made of fine worsted wool as an odd jacket, with low armholes and little trace of handwork. For almost a year, it hung untouched in my closet. But once I understood that these details were intentional, that they reflected Miuccia Prada’s deliberate vision, I embraced it. In that moment, I found the silhouette of the flâneur.
There is no more evocative image than the dim glow of tungsten light reflected in a canal, framed by the grandeur of old-world architecture: the quiet world of thinkers, writers, and poets. Gentlemen aware of modernity’s reality, yet resisting it in their own composed defiance.
Evening in Paris Rive Gauche, midnight in Roma Fontana; the shadow of a man in black tailoring remains the visual anchor of intellectual elegance from the 1960s and 70s. While others wore navy or grey suits with polished lace-ups, this man, in a black jacket, subtly flared trousers, and the glint of a shoe buckle beneath the moonlight, stood apart.
His ensemble speaks of a man who knows who he is, what unfolds around him, and the absurdity of it all—one who embraces it, and chooses to write his own script in response.