OTHERWORLDLY

The Fondazione Prada in Milan is a former distillery that’s been remade by the luxury brand as an art center. It was opened in 2015, after OMA Europe refurbished the existing structures and added three new ones. The ten-building campus lies along the city’s southern edge, in a precinct of warehouses, factories, and abandoned lots, and is secured with a masonry wall and uniformed guards. Stepping inside from the sidewalk is like falling into another world, one that’s radically interior, like a convent, a prison, or an asylum.

The artworks are sealed away in a series of strange, seemingly unrelated structures, that set a tone of unsettling quiet. It would be a sterile experience if not for the dazzling quality of the architecture. The buildings are cerebral in their planning, restrained in their geometries, and luxurious in their finishes. The Cinema is framed in brushed aluminum and clad with mirrored stainless steel panels. The Hall floor is a richly figured travertine. Staircases in all of the buildings are lined with perforated brushed stainless steel panels. Pragmatic elements like vents, access panels and stair handrails are gorgeously concealed.

Circulation, both through the campus and through each building, is obtuse. There are lots of ramps and staircases, and no door handles. Most of the buildings are entered through immense, unmarked automatic sliding doors. Signage is minimal, and no artwork is visible from outside. Young guards, dressed in unisex blue nylon Prada topcoats and Doc Martens, are required to give detailed directions to visitors. The restrooms are particularly difficult to navigate. All surfaces in these underground facilities, including the ceiling and the stall partitions, are constructed from a heavy steel grate. Dark and disorienting, the space is also slightly maddening. A sensible adult wonders, Where is the door? Where are the stalls? Where are the paper towels? And where, again, is the door?

Recent OMA projects have had a disappointingly commercial aspect, but this one bears the sly, witty signature of Rem Koolhas. The Fondazione has no center, no front face, and no real image. Its most iconic element (until the high-rise Torre under construction is completed) is the “Haunted House,” an existing four-story concrete building that’s been finished in a flat, softly-glowing 24-karat gold leaf, and that houses the permanent collection. It’s nestled at the end of a drive inside the campus, so that it remains invisible from the outside, and from most other points on the campus. Its small bare chambers offer sculptures by Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois and, more alluringly, opulent views into the city. Yet one isn’t permitted to step onto the balconies or take photos; one remains caught inside.

Photograph courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milano. By Bas Princen, 2015.

December 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses

BEAUTY AND BRUTALITY

The Prada Winter 2014 campaign, shot by Stephen Meisel, unfolds under an overcast sky, in a barren landscape, as a beautiful young couple loiter about an abandoned Brutalist house. Their clothes and accessories are “architectural,” rendered in black and white, accented in undiluted primary colors, and cut in crisp geometric lines. Against the bare concrete of the house the man and woman, in their luxurious duds, pop. The shots capture dramatically the contrast between hard and soft, bright and dull, flesh and stone. In the accompanying promotional film the couple play out an amour fou inside the house, which is furnished only with a bare mattress and folding chairs. It’s like a high design crack house.

But what building is this? It’s rough skin recalls a Paul Rudolph house in New England, but its curving concrete retaining wall recalls a Scarpa house in northern Italy. Credits for the campaign give us the name of the make-up artist and models but not of the house or its designers. Some of the campaign’s images are remarkable in that they do not even feature clothing, bags or shoes; they simply position the Prada logo against an enlarged detail of the architecture: a cornice, a stair, a wall. In these shots the texture of the aging concrete (crumbling, shadowed, damp) is richly sensual. It’s a roughened, sensibility that goes against the prevailing gloss of high fashion. But there’s nothing “architectural” about these images. They never reveal the entire building, or describe compellingly the place where it is. The movie is even less revealing, focused mostly on close-ups of the models and their clothing. This house isn’t a structure, really; it’s just a sign of Brutalist style.

March 30, 2015 by Nalina Moses

Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well. Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history. Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods. That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass.

It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s. Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand. The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t. On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins. Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication. There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes. These embellishments are all slightly oversized –they’re more than just ornaments – and fastened with visible stitching and hardware. There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing. But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands.

May 23, 2012 by Nalina Moses

One thinks of Elsa Schiaparelli as a wit more than an artist. What pops to mind first are the shoe hat, the lobster gown, and the seed packet dress, creations that are more like one-liners than clothes. What becomes apparent when seeing her work up close, as it’s possible to at the Met’s new exhibit Impossible Conversations, is that she was, also, an impeccable seamstress. The dinner jackets are fitted and fastened with armor-like severity, and the floor-length gowns are draped asymmetrically, on the bias, with a sumptuous, casual mastery. Without wit – without any ideas at all – the finesse of Schiaparelli’s cutting and draping would assure her reputation.

The Met exhibit pairs Schiaparelli with another great Italian fashion designer, Miuccia Prada, and is framed as a series of dialogues between the two. Throughout the galleries there are video monitors showing the two great ladies chatting with one another in a special film by Baz Luhrmann. Prada portrays herself, admirably, and actress Judy Davis portrays Schiaparelli with campy excess. The fineness of the garments on display show up Davis’ portrayal. (They also, unhappily, show up most of the Prada garments.) On a mannequin encased in a full-height vitrine, Schiaparelli’s silk lipstick-printed gown looks less like a piece of clothing than a delicate, palpitating, creature. It’s as if it were born rather than made. All the cerebral references – to surrealism, to popular culture, to women’s roles – are rendered irrelevant. When it comes right down to it, Schiaparelli knew how to make a dress.

May 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses