There's safety in numbers and Miuccia Prada knows the old adage very well. So for her Men's A/W 18 and Pre-Fall 18 collections, Prada invited four creative studios/designers - Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Konstantin Grcic, Herzog & de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas - to come up with a product using the iconic house fabric, black nylon.
The final results of this multiple collaboration were displayed during the runway show that took place yesterday in a new location, a company warehouse in Viale Ortles 35, Milan.
In the past brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec worked for Vitra, Kvadrat and Kartell and, fascinated by geometrical silhouettes cut by art students, architects and painters walking around with their art folders, they created for Prada a basic folder with elastic bands.
Konstantin Grcic, who founded his studio in Munich in 1991 and has since then designed for Flos, Muji and many more, moved from Joseph Beuys' famous fishing vest, but ended up creating an apron-like bag that can be used as an accessory or a garment.
Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the designers behind Prada's "Epicenter" store in Tokyo's Aoyama district, pondered on language, realised that it has sadly become an impotent and empty vehicle of information and employed text as a design pattern on clothes and accessories.
Prada collaborator Rem Koolhaas, who has also designed with his Rotterdam-based studio OMA, the Epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles and the Fondazione Prada, reimagined instad the classic backpack as a "frontpack".
This rectangular bag that can be carried on the front has a strong geometrical shape inspired by the modern devices many of us put everyday in their bags, such as laptops, tablets, smartphones, chargers and books. This new configuration of the classic backpack (that turned the model on the runway into a sort of human billboard...) also features various compartments that allow to reach out for everything immediately.
While the architect worked on the backpack, Koolhaas' AMO converted the space in Viale Ortles, into an archive-meets-warehouse: the depository was divided into sections, each of them corresponding to a theme and filled with boxes and crates lined on pallets, covered with Prada logos and stencils representing shoes, monkeys, bananas, dinosaurs, bugs, and "mysterious" slogans such as "ADARP" (yes, not that mysterious actually...).
Models walked down an industrial metal runway and the show opened with all-black "Pocone" industrial nylon garments and accessories.
The men's A/W 18 and women's Pre-Fall collections mirrored each other: there were plenty of padded nylon vests, jackets and shorts; long and short rounded-shoulder coats, skirts and tops. Volumes were amplified and the industrial reference wasn't only clear in the nylon material employed for all the looks, but also in the references to workwear and blue-collar workers.
Nylon wasn't the only link to the past, though: haunted by the ghost of seasons past, Miuccia ransacked the archives and collaged together several of her collections in this one.
This exercise in remixing her own designs rather than someone else's meant that the S/S 11 banana print was collaged with the flames motif from the S/S 12 collection in a men's short sleeve shirt matched with a Fair Isle jumper (for that surfer in freezing temperature look; maybe Miuccia was thinking about climate changes and the way some countries are currently subjected to extremely low temperatures while others are enjoying a mild winter...). In another case the flames were recombined with the black and white mermaid/print designs from the S/S 09 collection.
Classic S/S 1996 stripes were recombined with an abstract motif from the A/W 1996 collection, while a new version of an S/S 96 skirt in a retro geometric pattern was matched with a shirt that featured a red floral print from the A/W 2005 collection mashed with the post-nuclear Hawaiian print from the S/S 14 collection (note: the show very aptly took place just a day after there was a false ballistic missile alarm in Hawaii...).
Sections of illustrations by French artist, writer, director and porn actor Christophe Chemin from Prada's A/W 16 collection also made an appearance, while an S/S 10 romantic fitted coat was reinvented into a boxy and voluminously oversized piece.
The scrubs in bright colours from the S/S 11 collection were instead the inspiration behind the skirt suits and coats in camel, romato red, emerald and ultra violet with their hems dipped in industrial rubber (or was that silicone?).
As the catwalk progressed, there were new interpretations of Prada's more classic Linea Rossa, while at the very end tailored garments returned (for that private detective-meets-spy look...), some of them featured the same creases that gave the S/S 18 designs the impression they had come out of the printing press.
Most models donned bucket hats (was that Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Miuccia's Fear and Loathing in Milan?) while ID tags and Prada logos were clipped to tops and coats or bags.
This detail made you wonder: were the models on the runway going to work to a corporate office, were they scientists experimenting in a lab or workers in a massive warehouse belonging to a retail giant à la Amazon? Who knows. We are constantly monitored and classified, so the "specimen" on the runway represented the people in the world, while the crates and wooden boxes maybe contained animals from the past, as Miuccia herself explained, that became new hybrids in this collection. So the Island of Dr Moreau turned into the Warehouse of Dr Miuccia.
Mind you, there wasn't anything new here but a lot of Prada-isms, yet these two collections are the tangible proof that remixing the past is the key to the future for many contemporary brands. Will it work, increase the sales and finally allow the Prada Group to register some growth, also thanks to the new e-commerce platform launched by the company in China? We'll see, but returning to nylon products (and to more sombre colours for menswear) was maybe the right choice, after all, as Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."
Comments