Of Starchitects & Fashion Designers: OMA/AMO X Prada
As you may remember from a previous post, Prada's A/W 17 womenswear catwalk show took place in February in the company's dedicated space in Via Fogazzaro, Milan. The latter had been redecorated for the occasion by Prada's long-standing collaborators, Rem Koolhaas's OMA/AMO, and featured posters, photographs, postcards, maps and clippings celebrating women and feminists, and a reference to Miuccia's fascination with Fellini's City of Women.
The collection also featured illustrations by Robert McGinnis (also known for his film posters for Breakfast at Tiffany's, James Bond movies, Barbarella and The Incredibles) for '60s pulp thrillers, such as Brett Halliday's Murder and the Married Virgin and Never Kill a Client or Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason Solves the Case of the Half-Wakened Wife. The illustrations were printed on sheaths and pencil skirts. Inspired by them Prada recently launched a capsule collection comprising 11 "Poster Girl" T-shirts and sweatshirts. A few images call to mind McGinnis' covers, but the collection is actually the result of a collaboration with OMA/AMO. The illustrations reproduce indeed the posters for the runway show, with its February date and Milanese address.
McGinnis' illustrations, those scantily dressed femmes fatales with guns or ingenues turned sinister vixens with weapons of mass seductions were applied to garments as ways to hint at powerful women.
Yet in this new capsule collection there are just a couple of gun-bearing femme fatales acocmpanied by titles of what may be erotic thrillers (The Lion House and The 54th Street).
Quite a few of the other shirts seem to be characterised by stylised images of women or female characters with obscured or faded faces accompanied by conceptual slogans like "Continuous Interior" and philosophically sounding messages such as "Fashion is about the everyday and the everyday is the political stage of our freedoms. It is not a choice of convenience, it is a demand of the current moment." Now, while the idea of using the exploited female sexuality of pulp fiction as a fashionable weapon seemed to work in the collection, this sort of conceptual capsule looks like an aesthetic exercise in cashing in on the interior design for that fashion show, since the A/W 17 pulp heroines were turned into women with an architecturally obscure purpose.This capsule marks the first garment collaboration by OMA/AMO X Prada and, though rather dubious in its intents (well, apart from the main intent - making money), maybe it will lead to other projects such as a small line of accessories. It is only natural now to wonder who will be the next starchitect or architectural studio to jump on the fashion collaboration bandwagon with a prominent fashion house. Frank Gehry X Louis Vuitton? Peter Marino X Dior? Bets are open.
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