Prada’s traveling Pradasphere exhibition, in its second edition, officially opened in Shanghai at the newly established Start Museum, a warehouse-like private museum located along the city’s West Bund cultural corridor.
The exhibition, curated by co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, is organized around a ‘magazzino’, or working warehouse, that documents the brand’s 110 years of history and its involvement in art, architecture, culture and sports.
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The exhibition is open to the public free of charge from Thursday to January 21. Visitors can reserve a spot through Prada’s WeChat Mini Program.
Simons, co-creative director since 2020, was responsible for selecting the biggest hits from the label’s 30 years of ready-to-wear history.
“When you make a lot of great fashion, it’s hard to edit it,” says Simons, who initially started with 800 fashion outfits and eventually had a tight selection of about 200 looks, choosing “based on reason, not on effect” chose and presented in chronological order.
“When Miuccia started in 1988, there was already a clear brand DNA that is still extremely important for Prada as a brand, so it was important for me to take that as a criterion, and not just the eccentricity for example, which is clearly present . very important and also very present,” Simons added.
“I try not to be impressed, to think, my God… I always try to think about what’s next,” Prada said after touring the exhibition. Together with Simons, Prada put her personal spin on galleries such as ‘Cinema’, ‘Architecture’ and ‘Fondazione Prada’, three culturally related spaces of the exhibition.
“You may not believe it, but I love China. The first time I came to China, I was 25,” Prada said of the reason behind launching the show in Shanghai, which she last visited in 2019 for the runway show for the Spring 2020 men’s collection.
Michael Rock and his design studio 2×4, which co-created the first Pradasphere exhibition at Harrods in London among many other projects, worked closely with Prada and Simons to create a “rich and intimate” experience in Shanghai.
“The global economy of gigantic spectacles happening everywhere, including for fashion brands, creates a lot of audio, a lot of images, a lot of things, but the actual objects are somehow lost, so the only thing we really wanted to build in the exhibition was intimacy . You notice that you are very close to the things in the rooms, the rooms feel very familiar,” Rock explains.
Rock said the exhibition design was inspired by Prada’s factory in Tuscany and its warehouse in San Zeno, where physical ideas, such as retail concepts, are tested at full scale.
Upon entering the first womenswear ‘Magazzino’, viewers are presented with a combination of Prada’s archive runway looks, which began with the Fall 1988 collection, and the brand’s most recent, which continues through the latest Spring 2024 women’s collection. Staring upwards, mannequins are placed cross-legged at top level, as if past, present and future are looking critically at each other.
Prada’s heritage is showcased in two galleries branching off the main corridor.
“Fratelli Prada” recreates a corner of the original Prada store, created by Mario Prada, Miuccia Prada’s grandfather. At “Prada A Milano”, Prada’s nylon bags, a Miuccia creation from the 1980s, are on display alongside famous editorials by Albert Watson.
At ‘Gallery’, Prada collaborated with renowned artist Damien Hirst on two works of art that explored unique materials. Thirty handbags from the Prada archives are displayed in glass cases next to another cabinet filled with 3D-printed and chrome-plated replicas, playfully titled “Bag of Tricks.” Hirst’s second creation is a recessed version of the Prada Galleria bag, a current bestseller.
After the women’s clothing ‘Magazzino’ you enter the ‘Green Store’, a recreation of Prada’s store shelving system from the 1990s in the now iconic light green. Featuring 38 signature shoe designs, this section reflects a 1996 Andreas Gursky photograph that hangs at the entrance to the exhibition and is a documentation of the original store format.
The ‘Green Store’ leads to ‘Materiality’, a showcase of twenty reissues of famous Prada skirts made exclusively for the Shanghai Pradasphere.
Additional galleries, including ‘Re-Nylon’, ‘Vitrine’, ‘Luna Rossa’ and ‘Linea Rossa’, showcase items from Prada’s rich accessories collection and activewear lines.
After the menswear ‘Magazzino’, visitors land in the Pradasphere Caffè, where coffee, cocktails and signature snacks are served by the brand’s hospitality team in Milan.
Two adjacent green-skinned trains, an artifact from 1950s China, have been transformed into a workshop with the Galleria bag and a gift shop.
For Gianfranco D’Attis, CEO of the Prada brand since December last year, Pradasphere is intended to ‘make culture relevant’ and help ‘redefine luxury’.
D’Attis also revealed that Prada has set an ambition to double its Chinese operations “in the medium term”.
“We know our customers very well, we want to entertain them, we want to give them a better experience,” said D’Attis.
To engage with Chinese consumers with precision and surprise, Prada not only brought in VIP shoppers from across the country for the launch of the Shanghai Pradasphere, but also organized special trunk shows at Rong Zhai of its reissue dresses and other pieces featured at the exhibition were exhibited.
“You can expect something between 2024 and 2025 [retail] surprises from us,” D’Attis said, referring to a possible Prada Caffè for the Chinese market.
For D’Attis, who regularly travels to China, witnessing rapidly evolving consumer preferences and accelerating trend cycle in real time meant that the brand now “cares much more about training, about talent retention, about ways to meet customer expectations .” D’Attis said.
“We hope they will return to travel, we hope they will spend time abroad… but they will continue to spend money locally, they will continue to be treated like kings and queens in China. But things are moving so fast, maybe in two months I will have a different view,” D’Attis said.
According to D’Attis, the idea of staging distributed versions of the Pradasphere exhibition is already circulating among major landlords. “It could be an exhibition in Beijing with the Damien Hirst stand, a Luna Rossa pop-up in Chengdu, we will probably put the Fondazione Prada in Rong Zhai,” D’Attis added.
Launch Gallery: Inside the second Pradasphere exhibition
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