By way of a chat with her co-creative director at Prada Raf Simons, otherwise known for staying backstage, Miuccia Prada allowed fans a little closer into her world in a piece for The New York Times.

The conversation fled freely across a breadth of subjects, from discussion of their recent runway presentations to personal habits, and seems more of like a brainstorm, in which the 71-old designer admitted she doesn’t own a computer.

“On the phone, I am more concentrated,” she says. “We can talk theories. Like for the first season both of us felt we didn’t want to tell stories. He was interested in defining an aesthetic of Prada, very simplified, and I was on the same track.”

This design ethos aligned with Simons’ own proclivities, he reveals, as the Belgian designer admits that he “had never bought a piece from any of” the brands he’d worked at prior to Prada. That means Raf never wore Jil Sander, Dior or Calvin Klein prior to working at each establishment.

“I have been a Prada fan, a Prada watcher, a Prada wearer. I wore only Prada for, like, 15 years, because until a few years ago, I always felt it weird to walk around in my own clothes.”

The two then touched on elements of Simons’ debut Prada show (including the wrap motif) before pivoting to predictions of a post-COVID-19 fashion industry. “The one lesson I think fashion will not learn from this … is that it should be less greedy,” asserts Simons. “It became too much this economic machine. … Fashion became pop, and the winners now are the ones that scream hardest, not the ones that speak most intelligently.”

Prada agrees with her confidant, acknowledging that “we are in a capitalist world. … It’s easy to say consume less, produce less, but then we need to be ready to have less jobs.” Even in the face of blunt truths however, she admits that she still “feel[s] optimistic.”

Read the entire dialogue on The New York Times‘ website.