The Prada Café is both a cake shop and a historical inevitability. It sits on Mount Street, almost opposite the Connaught hotel, and between what used to be Nicky Clarke’s hairdressing salon and a luggage shop so expensive it has a queue outside. People are queuing up to explore late capitalism through the prism of luggage but, that aside, they seem quite disinterested in the world around them. Perhaps they are marvelling at their own stupidity in yearning for a £1,000 bag with no zip.
The Prada Café is a nickname. Its real name is Patisserie Marchesi 1824 and it travelled from Italy to the silliest part of Mayfair to join the vogue for fashion cafés in London. There is already a fashion café at Burberry, one at Ralph Lauren and one at the Berkeley, which, having nothing better to do, sells biscuits that look like shoes.
It is, of course, very pretty — Prada pretty, which means the kind of prettiness that appeals to hebephiles, all knee socks and satchels and lollies (and it is less like other bakeries — say Greggs) than like Prada itself, a brand which fetishises children with the pitiless eyes of a crone.
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