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.