‘Made in Italy? Who cares!’ Prada’s new economic geography

Abstract

The fashion firm Prada is currently turning away from the idea of place-image (communicated through its ‘Made in Italy’ labels) as a source of monopoly rents. In this article, I concern myself with this and other recent changes in the firm’s profit making, monopoly rent generating, and wealth producing strategies and tactics – linked together by the need, on the part of Prada, to deal with the recent loosening of the once tight interweaving of place and production. How Prada, in the process, redefined what counts as ‘place’ in a relational manner is interesting; as is the fact that the firm has become even more sophisticated in its attempts to extract every drop of profit, monopoly rent, and wealth out of the capitalist system (via, for example, a strategy of corporate appropriation which involves not only a distinctive ‘anti-brand/anti-fashion/anti-commercial’ position but also a supposedly disinterested patronage of contemporary culture). All this has significant implications for the geography literature.