In 2009, for a new project called The Iconoclasts,
Miuccia Prada asked four fashion editors — including Katie Grand and
Carine Roitfeld, then at the helm of French Vogue — to 'rethink' Prada
stores in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Five years later, the
concept will begin anew when, on the night of Prada's fall collection
(February 20) during Milan Fashion Week, W magazine fashion director
Edward Enninful recasts two Prada stores — women’s and men’s on Monte
Napoleone — based on the cultural, literary, and stylistic triumph that
was the Harlem Renaissance. Surely there are racial connotations at work here.
Overlapping
with the Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance saw a
creative explosion among the African-American community of Harlem in
New York City. The waves started there reverberated around the world and
launched the careers of, among many artists, musical greats Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Josephine Baker, who
performed in all-inclusive cabarets like the Cotton Club.
Enninful’s
vision, an imagined 1920s nightclub, incorporates a cast of black and
white mannequins dressed in Prada spring 2014 and archive pieces, posing
against a glittering art-deco bar. Similarly, a diorama at the men’s
store will showcase black and white mannequins sitting around game
tables, also dressed in Prada spring 2014 and archive pieces. The images
above, not part of the spring ad campaign, have been newly shot by Emma
Summerton.
The Milan installations will remain on view until
February 24. Two days later, Enninful’s vision for Prada’s new Saint
Petersburg store will be unveiled. We hope to see a reenactment of
Stonewall as a less-than-subtle dig at Putin's heinous anti-gay laws.
Animals in Clothes
Now that Fashion Month is winding down, you'll need a new
distraction. Animals in clothes, perhaps? Through the magic of Photoshop
(never let anyone tell you it's bad), Madrid-based advertising
photographer Miguel Vallinas has dressed up nearly 50 animals — i.e.
zebra, peacock, goat, swan, deer — in uncredited clothing. In Segundas Pieles
(Second Skins), he's thus taken fanciful anthropomorphic notions to
realistic and humorous extremes. Plus, no animals were harmed or
embarrassed.
