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for spontaneous travel, it offered a modern alternative to the hard-sided trunk. The Speedy, 1930s era, was originally called the Express, a compact city bag that brought Vuitton's language of travel into everyday life. The Noé, circa 1932, was designed to transport five bottles of Champagne, while its drawstring construction became an unlikely icon. The Alma, from 1992, saw a structured and architectural style, with a curved profile that brought a distinctly Parisian formality to the Monogram. In 2007, Neverfull saw the house create a light and deceptively simple open tote that would become a contemporary expression of Vuitton utility. Over the decades, through different times and needs, Vuitton reinforced the same underlying idea: function refined into form. Still LV The Monogram has lived several lives. It traveled from trunks to ocean liners and airplanes, became part of the modern handbag, collided with contemporary art and street culture, and entered an age in which images move faster than objects ever could. Yet Georges Vuitton's composition remains intact: the intertwined initials, the flowers, the repetition. One hundred and thirty years later, the pattern still reads simply: Louis Vuitton. F ew fashion houses can boast an address as steeped in history as Prada in Milan. Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is where Fratelli Prada opened the original boutique in 1913. More than a century later, Prada is expanding in Milan with the launch of Prada Galleria, a multilevel destination that expands the house across fashion, art, food, and culture. Opening this month, the ambitious project stretches across both sides of the Galleria's central dome. Prada Donna faces Prada Uomo, with the women's store enlarged and a new underground passage connecting the two. At the top of this new configuration is Pradasphere, an evolving public exhibition devoted to more than a century of Prada and a vehicle for the house to look at the ideas, objects, and cultural references that have shaped it over the past hundred years. Rounding out the project are Marchesi 1824 and Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. The house has brought some of the true joys of life — pastry, fashion, culture, and history — to one historic address and a complete expression of the brand and its vision, all at the place of its founding. Bravo. prada.com. SH Prada Comes Full Circle W hat are a few of your bildungsroman moments? Perhaps turning 16 and discovering a car in your driveway with a big bow. (Sadly, that's not one of mine.) Or, that pivotal moment after your fist keg party with a friend holding your hair back while you praised the porcelain god (unfortunately, that was one of mine, given that I had a bad '80s bilevel Flock of Seagulls haircut). Another of my rite-of passage moments was seeing the 1995 film Unzipped. Long fascinated by fashion during my high school and college years, I was living in NYC for graduate school and headed with a bunch of friends to a historic theater in the East Village (which still had a balcony, where we of course sat) to see the iconic documentary about Isaac Mizrahi baring his soul in the creative process. It opened my eyes to what was happening behind the scenes — like pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. BTW, the premise of the film is exactly that: It's unzipping the curtain to see what was happening while the models dressed and makeup artists such as Kevyn Aucoin applied that last brush to a girl's eyelashes before she hit the runway. And, by girls, I mean the supermodels of that era: Christy, Linda, Naomi, Kate, and Cindy. I watch Unzipped every two to three years to revive my excitement about fashion. That Fall 1994 collection still holds up today — the voluminous soigné skirts apropos for any ball incarnation, paired with puffy ski jackets and demure sequined slip dresses. Shalom Harlow careened down the runway with an old-school video camera, filming an audience that included Richard Gere (Cindy Crawford's husband at the time), Roseanne Barr, Eartha Kitt, Liza Minnelli, and Sandra Bernhard, who also has candid moments with Mizrahi in his design studio. If you didn't see the first go-around, Janus Films has acquired the North American rights for the Douglas Keeve film, and a 4K restoration will air in New York City on Friday, September 25 — three decades after its original premiere — followed by a nationwide release. If this is your first viewing, watch for fashion editors Candy Pratts Price's and Polly Allen Mellen's off-the-French-cuff opinions on the collection. Pratts Price eating in a deliberate manner while instructing the director, "This is off-camera"— in a voice once described by Zac Posen as a "lockjaw from Larchmont" — is worth the price of admission alone. Billy Fong Isaac Mizrahi and Cindy Crawford in Douglas Keeve's Unzipped COURTESY IMDB 62