'Feels Like Prada' animates façades and objects with hypnotic geometric patterns

To promote Prada’s Fall/Winter 2021 campaign, the Italian luxury fashion house has transformed the façades of buildings across the city of Milan into immersive installations, featuring mesmerising geometric patterns that echo the company’s bold prints and designs. Endeavouring to capture the soul of the Fall/Winter collection and its accompanying promotional strategy – titled Feels Like Prada, the installations are accompanied by similar smaller-scale interventions on product packaging, banners, and walls, among other spaces. Manifesting the fantasy portrayed in the FW21 campaign, which depicts various surfaces being overtaken by the collection’s textures and patterns, the project seeks to infuse urban spaces with an atmosphere that is quintessentially Prada.

As captured in photos by British fashion photographer David Sims, the Fall/Winter 2021 Prada collection, designed by Co-Creative Directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, has been described as an “exploration of the evocation of feeling”. Showcased through a series of images arranged in reels, each outlining an independent narrative, the advertising campaign supporting the collection creates an abstract, complex ensemble that is ‘multifaceted and vibrant, sensorial and intensely emotional’, as stated by the organisation in an official release. At the heart of the collection is a celebration of the tactile and sensorial, following a time when such experiences were restricted due to public health concerns imposed by the pandemic. To this end, the collection expresses desire for sharing, contact, and forging relationships. Experimental initiatives across the cities of Florence, Rome, Paris, London, New York, Shanghai, and Tokyo, triggered by this initial spark, will subsequently accompany the campaign - creating a resonating play of aesthetic and semantic references.

The first pair of ‘activations’ at Via Spallanzani, 18 and Via Casale feature motifs in black and white geometric monochrome and wool-like weave patterns with purple highlights respectively. In this vein, the installation billboards transform and multiply the surrounding urban panoramas with the motifs of the collection - with visible hints towards fabric patterns and prints commonly seen in fashion design. Further installations have been planned in bakeries and delis within the lineup of participating cities. Bakeries in particular will be a hotspot for such activations across the various cities involved in the campaign - where bread packaging, walls, as well as vegetable and fruit crates will be dressed with the campaign’s visual identity.

Bursting with playfulness and spontaneity, the activations physically and digitally re-fashion public spaces and quotidian objects - essentially, surfaces that can be touched and felt, through the lens of the FW21 campaign. Embodying Prada’s fluid nature that has always adapted to changing times, the campaign unites the underlying threads that bind the brand’s identity across history, to capture a moment that truly ‘Feels Like Prada’.