Prada

Mario Prada opened his luxury goods shop in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in 1913; the original store, with its mahogany fittings, still trades there. The modern house is his granddaughter Miuccia's creation: taking over in 1978, she made the counterintuitive move that defined it — black industrial nylon, the stuff of army tents, turned into handbags and backpacks that made utilitarian anti-luxury the height of fashion. Prada became the intellectual pole of Italian style, its collections read as essays, its Fondazione in Milan a serious contemporary art institution. The nylon (now regenerated Re-Nylon), the Saffiano cross-hatched leather Mario used for trunks, and the triangle logo are the house codes. The Galleria store is the pilgrimage: buy the nylon there, where the house began — the object that proved luxury could be a concept rather than a material.

The Re-Nylon pieces are the historically resonant purchase; in Milan, pair the Galleria store with the Fondazione for the house's full intellectual range.