PRADA’S AW2022 MENSWEAR SHOW INTRODUCES A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO THE PHYGITAL RUNWAY
Photo Courtesy of Prada
20 jan 2022, for frame
Location
L.go Isarco, 2, 20139 Milano MI, Italy
Design, Architecture
Brand
Music
Site
Deposito of the Fondazione Prada
Floor Area
1,000 sq-m
AMO forged a futuristic metaspace behind the Prada runway, where celebrity models ‘walked from the past to the future’.
Key features
The AW22 Prada men's show by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons took place at the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada in Milan, which AMO reimagined as a cinema. Taking advantage of Cinema Fondazione Prada’s seating and replicating its olive-green carpet, the space told very little about the upcoming fashion performance at first glance. When the lights went down for the show, one was left guessing as to where the models would enter from – the sudden mechanical opening of two invisible doors on each side of the runway started the show with a shock.
Opened by actor Kyle MacLachlan and followed by nine other Hollywood stars including Damson Idris, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Asa Butterfield, the show’s spatial concept was born from popular cultural references. The models emerged from bright blue neon-lit tunnels clad in metal grating, both symbolically leading nowhere. Outlined only by lights, the dramatic Z-shaped runway studding the otherwise open-plan space was designed to get the audience questioning ‘Is it the past or is it the future?’, a nod to MacLachlan’s role on television show Twin Peaks.
The positioning of photographers at both ends of the runway to support the show’s livestream added another element to the spectacle and continued a past strategy employed by AMO for Prada. After the label’s AW21 show, architect Rem Koolhaas coined the term ‘close up from the back’, referring to the ability to observe fashion not only as it comes toward you, but also as it disappears into the distance.
Frame's take
AMO already explored ‘the tunnel’ as a spatial composition principle for the Prada SS22 show: a red tunnel, influenced by cinematic montages, ‘opened up’ onto the beaches of Sardinia. Prada’s tunnels for its FW22 show, populated by famous Hollywood actors, served as an analogue representation of the phenomena we call cinema – but with no montage involved. With this presentation AMO created an entirely new approach to the fashion show space: the focus was switched from the actual space – a cinema theatre – to the tunnels behind the runway. It’s a floorplan never before executed in AMO and Prada’s long collaboration history.
For the observers of the show online, these behind-the-scenes tunnels were even more dominant, composing a perspective-bending metaspace. We daresay that the need to be innovative amidst four COVID-affected fashion seasons has, for Prada, spurred an architectonic fluidity between physical and digital spaces, thanks to such intelligent floorplans and contrasting finishing materials.