Prada The America’s Cup

The International Herald Tribune | January 14, 2003 Tuesday

In America’s Cup, ‘loser’ Prada still scores a victory

by Marion Hume

AUCKLAND, New Zealand

Basta!” At last, the Italian in front of me in the smallest Prada store on earth declares he has enough T-shirts to take back home. I wait for him to pay because there is only one sales assistant. There’s only room for one. You couldn’t swing a Prada belt in here.

We’re squeezed into the back of a boat shed in Auckland. But what is on sale in a store smaller than a dinghy is unique. Everything has the Milanese company’s signature, sporty, red stripe. But it also has the words “Challenge for America’s Cup 2003” on a transparent rubber label.

The fact that Prada has been again eliminated from the world’s most expensive yacht race is not deterring those trophy-hunting for never-to-be-repeated windcheaters, bomber jackets and caps, which are not on sale anywhere else.

The yachtsmen of Team Prada may be back on dry land, but in the battle of sporting merchandise, Prada is victorious. When Team Prada first threw down a challenge for the America’s Cup five years ago, other competitors looked like yachties. Team Prada upped the style stakes by turning up looking like champions.

For the 2003 challenger series which will conclude after five months in February all the teams have dressed to kill and are also selling merchandise to fans; and not just sports fans either, since the fashion set discovered that the Swiss team, Alinghi, was offering bright sweats as good as the hip LA brand, Juicy Couture. Yachting merchandise has gone beyond the weather-worn T-shirt to become chic and hip.

Credit for this must also go to Louis Vuitton, the naming rights sponsor and organizer of the challenger series for the America’s Cup. Back in 1983, when Vuitton first became associated with races akin to fighter pilot skirmishes on water, it was a luxury luggage company.

Since Marc Jacobs was signed as designer in 1997, it has become a hot fashion house and now offers a cup collection so sleek that you’ll want to keep wearing the pea coat and the sweats and slicker long after the America’s Cup, made by the British jeweler Garrard in 1851, has been handed to the victors. And you’ll be hoping your girlfriend will still want to wear her saucy yet sporty Louis Vuitton swimsuit.

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As for Prada, at least women in Auckland can now wear the label without people jumping to conclusions. Back at the America’s Cup 2000, barring a duty-free selection of bags and shoes, Prada wasn’t available down here. You virtually had to get intimate with a yachtsman to get hold of a T-shirt (which, of course, made them as prized as nylons in World War II). Maybe today’s tiny store was opened in the interests of morality. But it still only sells landlubber’s kit and not the skintight gear Team Prada wore when competing.

Prada is not the first fashion giant associated with the America’s Cup. Ralph Lauren saw his Polo logo writ large over the 1992 victor, America3, and tipped a toe back in the water this time with merchandise for one of the three American Challengers, OneWorld (now eliminated). The late Maurizio Gucci sponsored a syndicate.

But in Patrizio Bertelli, fashion and sport have fused; for before he became “Mr. Prada” he was a competitive yachtsman. His wife, Miuccia Prada, inherited the company from her grandfather.

The America’s Cup attracts self-made moguls both as competitors and spectators to a sport involving sailing daringly close to the wind. There are at least 50 millionaires and probably a dozen billionaires currently in Auckland. Yet the dress code is dress down. Gone are the days of rich, suave chaps like Gianni Agnelli, the late Fiat titan, in his hand-tailored blazer.

But don’t conclude these guys aren’t showoffs. Take a look at the big boy toys they bring with them.

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and co-funded the OneWorld challenge for the America’s Cup, owns Tatoosh, a 92-meter (302-foot) super yacht, currently in Auckland and equipped with six jet skis, two inflatables, two catamarans and a helicopter.

Larry Ellison, the world’s fifth richest person (according to the Forbes annual list of the world’s richest people), heads the Oracle syndicate that is taking on the Swiss syndicate Alinghi in the challengers’ series finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup that started Saturday. The best-of-nine America’s Cup starts Feb. 15. Ellison owns a floating palace called Katana, which is 74 meters long and moored adjacent to the Prada base, which must remind Bertelli (the world’s 413th richest person) that his 33-meter cruising racer, Ulisse, is rather small.

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Allen, Ellison and the other 118 super yacht owners currently Down Under won’t be cruising home when the high stakes sailing concludes. Instead, they’ll take their private planes while their boats travel on vast ocean-going transporters. The alternative is just too much effort. It costs 10 percent of a super-yacht’s purchase price to keep it per year even if you do only use it for day trips. Tatoosh is worth $200 million

But that annual outlay is chump change compared to what it costs a tycoon to try to win the America’s Cup. All those who lost this time are expected to return in 2006. After all, it is an obsession. Even if, in this game, you pay to play.

Bertelli said in Florence on Friday that he did not plan for Prada to compete in the next America’s Cup. “It is the end of single designer boats and the end of an era,” he said.