THE DESIGNER.

Last month, ten days before Miuccia Prada was scheduled to present her collection of women's clothing for the 2004 fall season in Milan, she began, in her own words, to "freak out." The day before, she had been relaxed, amiable, and entertaining. She had even dressed with her customary eccentricity: lime-green skirt, mauve cashmere cardigan, short black socks, and a pair of fringed brown wingtips so cumbersome that they seemed like something only a nun or a golfer would wear. Or Miuccia Prada. By the time she got to her office the next morning, her mood had shifted. It was Valentine's Day--and her seventeenth wedding anniversary, as a matter of fact--but there were no roses, chocolates, or champagne in sight, just bottled water, a plate of sliced oranges, and a lot of coffee. Her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, the demanding and theatrical Tuscan who is the chief executive of the global group of companies that bears the Prada family name, had left early on his Lear jet to attend to the production of shoes at one of their factories near Florence. I asked if she was sorry that she would have to spend their anniversary without him. "Are you kidding?" she replied. "Thank God he is gone. Because he would have ideas. And, right now, if he told me what he thought I would kill him."

Prada was struggling, as she often does, to balance the commercial requirements of a giant international corporation with her idiosyncratic aesthetic goals. "I want to rule the world," she told me once, not completely in jest. "I want the name Prada to be huge. But also I want to make what I want to make and what I want to wear." It is almost impossible to be both avant-garde and immensely successful, and Prada knows that; but she insists on trying. "We are completely stuck," she said at one point in the afternoon. "Nothing is working out. Not the shapes of the collars or the silhouettes or the fabrics or the colors. Nothing. They don't even look like clothes. In my head, I have a very clear idea of what I want, but my ideas don't seem to match with reality and I don't know what to do." Nearly every season since 1988, when she introduced her first line of women's clothing, Prada has shown an astonishing ability to create trends: it began with a black bag made of industrial nylon and trimmed in leather--a simple purse that acquired a cult following and, eventually, helped launch a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Since then, she has brought out military clothes that set off a trend for utilitarian chic; slingback Sabrina heels that caused one sensation and oversized wedges that caused another; and, in 2000, an updated, deeply coveted thousand-dollar version of a bowling bag. In each case, she managed to convert a private obsession with things like kitsch, uniforms, and wallpaper into an international symbol of cool.

This year, Prada was inspired by computers and by the idea of "exploring the boundary of what is real and what is virtual"--an increasingly serious pursuit for her. She had spent hours peering at video games, examining how the characters were dressed and how they moved; then she used prints and photographs to blur the distinctions between them. But she still had to turn it all into clothes. "They need to be fashionable"--a word she hates--"and commercial, too," she said. "This is where I really suffer. Because there are three basic questions I have to ask myself: Do I like the clothes? Will they sell? And are they new? They are very different questions, and I can almost never seem to match them up. Look at the coat I was just working on"--a tartan trenchcoat cut from green, orange, and purple wool and trimmed in fur. "From a selling point, I know perfectly well what people will want. If I try to turn this into something that is possibly nice to wear, it will come out banal. Because usually what's nice to wear is banal. And this is my problem. Do I make the clothing people want or the clothing I think they ought to wear?"

All day, she had been in her workroom, on the top floor of the Prada headquarters, on Via Bergamo. A harsh sun cut through the wall of windows, and after three frustrating hours she took a break and walked next door to her office, which--like the rest of the building--is crafted from the school of icy Nordic modernism: no chintz sofas or inviting fireplaces, just polished cement and exposed plumbing. Dozens of books were piled neatly on a black table, and rows of ceramics sat on a windowsill. The walls, painted an industrial ochre, were empty, the floor an unbroken expanse of concrete. The wastepaper basket--also with nothing in it--was black; so were the tables and chairs. There are no family snapshots (she has two teen-age sons)--in fact, no personal touches at all. A work of art by Carsten Holler protruded from the middle of the floor. At first glance, it looks like a horrendous construction error, or a particularly wide trash chute placed in the most inconvenient location possible; actually, it's a slide that snakes along the building's three floors and empties into a courtyard outside. There are safety pads on the floor for anyone who is willing to give it a try.

Prada had been carrying on an endless discussion of pleats (yes or no, how big, where will they fall), faille, and the possibilities of computer-generated design. Her design director, Fabio Zambernardi, was by her side, as he has been for more than fifteen years. (Before that, he worked as a jeweller, then attended dental school.) As she talked, Zambernardi drew. Shoes, collars, dresses. The height of a waist, the length of a skirt. They debated the heft of a cashmere-wool blend that she wanted to use in a dress. "I like heavy fabrics," she said to me at one point. "Fabio is against." She wanted a long, low arch to a high-heeled pump; he wanted it sharper and higher. It went on like that all day. At one point, she was informed that the factory would not deliver clothes for three more days. "Why?" she asked plaintively, and instructed an assistant to phone a foreman. No answer. "My God, where are they?" she muttered. "It's ten days before a show and they aren't working?" She turned back to staring dolefully at textiles printed in what seemed like psychedelic versions of television-test patterns. After a while, she looked up and whispered, "You know what? This time, I think we could really have something like a complete, total disaster."

She saw me roll my eyes. "I have a kind of complex of this work being superficial and dumb," she said. "It's my personal drama. Not the world's. Everyone who is smart says they hate fashion, that it's such a waste of time. I have asked many super-serious people, 'Then why is fashion so popular?' Nobody can answer that question. But somebody must be interested, because when I go to the stores the people are there. Thousands of them. So I have grown tired of apologizing for being in this ...