Check out the rest of GQ's first annual Fashion Awards, honoring the designers, brands, and trends that made the biggest impact in 2019.

This year's Met gala was a spectacle of look-at-me appearances, with guests arriving on divans, inside chandeliers, and on foot with their own head in their hands. And then there was Frank Ocean, who didn't so much arrive as show up, looking like the valet, in all-black Prada: nylon anorak, plain trousers, and leather boots. It was an elegant snub to the “camp” theme, totally anti-status—and classic Prada. “Doing fashion with men, I thought that they never wanted to exaggerate,” says Miuccia Prada, who is referred to reverently in fashion circles as Mrs. Prada. “When it's too much ‘fashion,’ it's never right.” Her contribution to men's clothing, she says, has been “to make a little bit of fashion to free them. But not too much.” To wear Prada, Ocean's look coyly reminded us, is to use your brain to put on clothes: to take an intellectually rigorous approach to getting dressed.

If other designers chase must-have garments, Mrs. Prada chases ideas, always hunting for the next big one. We meet in Milan for an interview and photo session in a hangar-like space at the Fondazione Prada, which has recently been covered in a vast, funky palette of tiles for her spring 2020 womenswear show. That show had been only about a week earlier, but, she tells me, “I am already into something different.” After all, she says, “clothes can help to express yourself, but what counts is who you are, and what you think, and how to behave.”

For Mrs. Prada, style is the avenue to intellectual revelation. In the '90s, at the helm of the company her grandparents founded in 1913, she began to produce women's and men's clothing, transforming a luxury-leather-goods business into the thinking person's fashion brand. This year, in addition to Ocean, a number of men wore Prada as if they'd joined a monastic order, often head to toe and in some cases even exclusively. Jeff Goldblum, Odell Beckham Jr., Ansel Elgort, and A$AP Rocky showed how Mrs. Prada's alchemy of restraint and subversion, which felt like the spirit of the age in the late '90s, is an appealing statement today, in a world where getting dressed has become such a performance.

Now, after three decades of fashion that challenges, beguiles, and delights, her relentless spirit of creative integrity is a heritage in the same way other brands tout craftsmanship. “There was a moment in the past few years that seemed like only bombastic announcement was working,” she tells me. Her fingers, with nails bare and neatly trimmed short, stroke a pile of pearl strands that hang around her neck. “But now, mainly in the new generation, there is an appreciation of serious integrity.”

Mrs. Prada always comes not simply for people's wallets, but—like the figure who inspired her fall 2019 collection, Dr. Frankenstein—for people's brains.

Mrs. Prada is one of the few current designers who make actual trends rather than viral garments. Her fall 2019 collection was definitive Prada in its conflicting conviction: beautifully thought-out clothing that looked amazing on Instagram. The cartoony Frankensteins, ghoulish roses, and grotesque neon tufts of hair on button-up shirts and wool pullovers were like a zap of electricity that brought the collection to life online months before it landed in stores. (You might say Mrs. Prada played three-dimensional chess while other designers, some of whom seem to exist almost exclusively online, played Instagram checkers.) Although she prefers to work with established silhouettes rather than developing her own signature—“I like to work in the frame of the classic,” she says—you know something is Prada when you see it. In this age, that can be bad, the sign of a meme disguised as fashion—and yet with Prada, it's an indicator of aesthetic clarity.

Mrs. Prada is as proactive and forward-thinking as any designer working today. She responded head-on to the controversy around a monkey key chain the brand produced in late 2018 that resembled racist caricatures like Little Black Sambo, asking director Ava DuVernay and artist Theaster Gates to lead a program that pushes the brand's staff toward a more diverse reality beyond scholarships and corporate training. Gates recently spearheaded a project in London, a kind of traveling social club, where he invited “creatives and artists of color. And we didn't have to call that the diversity party,” he says. The idea is to get “the Prada execs and the Prada salespeople and the Prada logistics people alongside these amazing people,” Gates says. And Mrs. Prada is open to the hard truths? “In some cases, Miuccia is also bringing difficult truths. She's saying, ‘I don't want to just do some kind of token thing.’ ”

Prada's 2019 hits (from left): Frank Ocean at the Met gala, A$AP Rocky onstage, and a spring runway look. From left: Dia Dipasupil; Paras Griffin; Victor Virgile

Her legendary mind has made Mrs. Prada, who loves cinema, into something of a movie star herself, with a celebrated wardrobe that commingles power with intimacy (she is wearing riding boots and a brown coat with huge mother-of-pearl buttons over a cream slip with a lace hem), and a conversation style that demands an exchange of ideas with almost romantic urgency. At one point, a thought about fashion as self-expression morphed, over the span of a few sentences, into a discussion of why women are still subjugated to men. “Because probably we don't like power enough, or we are not interested enough,” she says. “Or we are more human.” I suggest that men have made power look unattractive. She objects: “For the whole of history, women were attracted by power. Do you think that's really so?” I was thinking of the past five years; she was thinking of the past 500. Mrs. Prada sees the moment and the history.