For Prada’s Fall/Winter 2021 menswear show, frequent fashion house collaborators AMO (the research arm of OMA) and Rem Koolhaas decided to take a psychedelic approach, designing four rooms for the show’s backdrop that seem like the exact opposite of the stark, technocratic feel brought to the Spring/Summer 2021 womenswear show.
The menswear show, Possible Feelings, showcased the debut co-collection of designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, and AMO leaned in hard on the concept of duality. Prada described Possible Feelings’ theme as “tak[ing] as its basis an intimate and personal wish for contact, our urge to exchange and relate. The foundation of all is the individual: the human body, and its freedom. The need to feel, the pleasure of tactility, results in a panoply of surface, texture and textile.”
The resultant runway(s) mix-and-match fake fur with marble, resin, and plaster to create tactile, contrasting surfaces across each room, linked by square doorways.
In the first, faux red fur lines a square room with a polished resin floor. That leads into a round room, rimmed with a thick marble wall, entirely contiguous, and lined with long blue fur that peaks like waves and easily highlights the footwear trudging over it.
In the next room, the fur migrates to the walls, with luscious swirls of purple clashing with the green-veined marble underfoot (if you’ve ever walked over marble, the smoothness is immediately apparent, even uncomfortable, through shoes). The show stops in the final room, markedly different than the rest: a hexagon rendered in pink plaster walls by AMO with white fake fur as carpeting.
The materiality, though sticking to a simple palette, was doubly important during Possible Feelings as everything will be disassembled and either recycled for other Prada installations or donated to Meta, a Milan-based upcycling company.
The entirety of the Possible Feelings installation has been digitized and uploaded for touring virtually, though obviously remote viewers will lose out texture-wise.
Meanwhile, over at Louis Vuitton’s Fall-Winter menswear show in Paris, Virgil Abloh’s “wearable cityscape” puffer jackets have been drawing mixed reactions online.
