In yesterday's post we looked at Prada's A/W 2020 menswear collection. Let's continue the thread for another day to look at some architectural and graphic details in this collection. First of all the set by Rem Koolhaas' OMA/AMO.
As stated in the previous post, the set, a box-like metaphisical square surrounded by a series of doors, was designed by Rem Koolhaas' OMA/AMO. In a way the series of doors that opened onto the square were reminiscent of Superstudio's rendering for the Temporal Cochlea-City, one of the Twelve Imaginary Cities designed by the architectural studio.
This city didn't actually include a square, since it was had vertical configuration and was shaped like an endless screw that pierced the earth. This city was composed of living cells arranged in a double row of concentric circles, and each cell had a single door opening onto a circular roadway. The open doors integrated in Prada's set called to mind the line of doors to the cells of this dystopic city in Superstudio's rendering.
For what regards the abstract patterns on the garments, we mentioned Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser's geometrical patterns, but leafing through books of patterns from the early 1900s, you will discover further motifs vaguely reminiscent of the ones in this collection.
Flowers and foliage patterns were pretty popular in those times, and you will easily find echoes of the abstract leaf-like motif in Prada's collection in John Ruskin's leaf curvature studies in The Elements of Drawings (1857) or in compositions from the early 1900s like the ones by Harry Napper, who produced a lot of stylised floral designs.
The iris is a recurrent flower in prints from the early 1900s and in some cases it inspired geometrical configurations like the ones in Alois Kunzfeld and Oskar Rainer's Naturgemäßer Zeichen-und Kunstunterricht (1915).
The flower also reappeared in Prada's collection, together with square patterns, that were employed for prints and knits. The use of geometries on garments, and in particular of square blocks, was popular in the 1920s, as proved by this peignoir from 1925.
If you're interested in learning more about floral and foliage patterns derived from geometries like the square and the circle, check out Walter Crane's volume Line and form (you can download it here Download WalterCrane_LineandForm).
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