44. PRADA - A SPACE BETWEEN DESTRUCTION AND CREATION.
A series of artisan artifacts in LONDON.
Hand-stitched fringe dress with metal and crystal embroideries. Spring Summer 2024 Womenswear collection - Prada.
Borrowed utility jackets arrive - worn down, sprouting their internal waddings - modern trophy heirlooms - a life previously lived, the marred surface of belonging. Artisanally aged to costume a chosen reality, a series of identities offer a heroine’s wardrobe of perverse contradictions and intellectual complications.
A series of unlikely pairings flirt, never to be photographed by Lindbergh's lens, alas a delicious melancholia seeps - like Absinthe on flaming cubes of sugar - to be swallowed whole - a sweet liquor rush distilled to delicacy for a grown-up palette.
Canvases shrugged on over hand-stitched flapper fringe - hang by a thread, sway on bleached oak hangers - matte-ly porous and albino against a deeply pigmented patchwork of leathers.
Meticulous micro-metal and crystal-stamped embroideries disrupt a delicacy of textiles - abrupt close-up yet protected with perfected diamond shimmer from afar.
Hand-stitched nylon and leather bag - Spring Summer 2024 Womenswear collection - Prada.
A re-imagined replica of an archival Mario Prada bag tether an assortment of transcience, quietly signaling back to the heartbeat of a brand recognised for its DNA of the luxurious, the rare, and the symbolic.
Originally in ruched and pleated black moire, now offered in feather-light, paper-thin nappa or signature nylon - snapping-shut with an ivory lock carved in the form of a satyr head - a direct resin replica of its original mimic the possible Japanese *netsuke origin.
An artifact, more talisman than mere decorative adornment, its protruding tongue and intense grimace remind and reflect back to an ancient - future punk - to destroy is to create.
The Satyr head - a possible netsuke object, originally in the possession of Mario Prada - replicated for a series of bag fastenings within the Spring Summer 2024 Womenswear collection - Prada.
Archival original - image courtesy of Prada X.
*Netsuke, formed by the characters 'ne', meaning root and 'tsuke' meaning attached - are highly prized, hand-carved micro objects originally created as toggle-like fastenings for securing the cord belts worn by gentlemen in 17th century Japan.
The Start Museum 111 Ruining Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai - until January 21, 2024.
Prada Spring Summer 2024 collection is available from January 2024.
Special thanks Rebecca Fletcher-Campbell, Edlira Panxha and Sui Zhonghua - Prada.