The Milan headquarters of Prada, one of the world’s most revered fashion houses, is spread around a courtyard that is the embodiment of restrained good taste: proportions are harmonious, and a colour scheme of taupe and grey relaxes the eye. In one corner, however, a transparent, tubular slide snakes mysteriously from an office window down to the ground. It’s a work by German artist Carsten Höller, who a year ago filled Tate Modern with a series of vertiginous tubes that entertained millions of visitors with hair-raising descents.

It is part of the mythology surrounding the fashion house that Miuccia Prada, its co-owner and residing design genius, regularly slithers down the slide from her office in an adrenaline-fuelled rush to feed her latest ideas to colleagues working on the next collection. The stories of a Batman-style descent are an amusing confection, which dovetail nicely with the Prada image of stylish eccentricity. The image of Miuccia and the slide works on several levels: not just highlighting the lightning-fast dictates of Prada’s vocation but also describing the confluence of interests that has developed between the dizzying worlds of fashion and contemporary art.