Fashion plates

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. I can never look at Prada clothes without thinking of Elizabeth Báthory, but I am not that interested in skirts.

The café is a child’s vision of ecstasy, a pantomime in sugar breathed out by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but with Art Deco, which is crueller. The exterior is late imperial red brick, with black metal; the interior is glass cabinets, brass finishes and cold pink sugar. The floors are marble, the mirrors are clean, the chairs are mossy green. It is exquisite, and because it is a fashion café, it is more fashion than café.