Handbags mean different things to different women—beyond conferring style, they are signifiers of status, wealth, and identity. Nowhere is this more the case than at Prada, where Miuccia Prada has made a storied career of creating clothes and accessories that are cultural semaphores charged with meaning. As she has famously declared, “What you wear is how you present yourself to the world—especially today, when human contacts go so fast. Fashion is instant language.”
As the uniform of fashion insiders, Prada is shorthand for a world beyond frippery. One of the reasons so many of the label’s offerings become classics beloved by intellectuals—real and wannabe—is that they hint at the wearer’s inner life. Launched in 2007, the Prada Galleria bag certainly fits that bill. It has remained stubbornly faithful to itself and is a go-to for chic, thinking women everywhere. Although over the years the zip-up design has been reimagined in various fabrications and rendered with a variety of embellishments, including the new beaded nylon version pictured here, its rectilinear shape has stayed remarkably consistent. It’s as though Prada had assessed the bag’s minute design modifications and proclaimed, basta!
The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the location of Prada’s first store and the inspiration for the bag’s name.
Touring Club Italiano/Marka/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The Galleria is assembled from 83 separate pieces and has three pockets (one in the center, and two zippered multifunctional compartments on either side). Although emblematic of today’s design ethos, the bag also nods to the artisanal exactitude that has been synonymous with the label since Prada’s grandfather, Mario Prada, founded the company in 1913. The name Galleria refers to the location of the first Prada store, in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade, by the Duomo in Milan.
Scarlet Mariposa (Calochortus kennedyi), by Mary Vaux Walcott, 1926.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
A doctor on a house call, 1950s.
H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images
The bag’s top-handled, trapezoidal shape recalls the medicine bags popular in the post–World War II era—a resemblance that is not lost on some particularly stylish modern medics. “I like bags with large capacity because I like to put in them a lot of daily necessities or medicines,” says Qin Huilan, a retired doctor who lives in Shanghai and has emerged as an unlikely fashion influencer thanks to her Instagram-friendly Prada get-ups. A septuagenarian superfan of the Prada universe, Huilan, who owns six Gallerias, walked in Miu Miu’s fall/winter 2024 show in Paris.
A rendering of a top-handled bag by artist Albert Allen, circa 1942.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Artists, too, have fallen under the Galleria’s spell: Damien Hirst riffed on its design in two works he showed last December at Pradasphere II, an exhibition in Shanghai charting the brand’s history. That history also includes Galleria fans like Scarlett Johansson, Rihanna, Kate Middleton, and Hailey Bieber—quite a particular crew. The fact that a single accessory can appeal to a doctor, a princess, and the biggest music and film stars on the planet certainly suggests that, almost 20 years after its launch, the Galleria is here to stay.
