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When guests took their seats for the Spring 23 Prada runway show on Sunday, they found that they were sitting on chairs made of sturdy cardboard planks. The seating was arranged inside a mock house, with oversized doors and window cutouts throughout, and enormous white sheets of paper hanging from the ceiling. The floors, brown and smoothly textured, seemed destined for the recycling bin. The whole thing looked like an architect’s model blown up to monumental size.
The set was the latest collaboration between Prada and Rem Koolhaas, the 77-year-old Dutch architect. Since 2004, Koolhaas has masterminded the conceptually rich spaces in which Miuccia Prada shows her work, an intriguing partnership between two of the most influential designers in their respective fields. Mrs. Prada is an intellectual whose collections invite loving contemplation, and Koolhaas, who has designed famous buildings like the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, intends for his spaces to do the same. Over the course of his 18-year partnership with Mrs. Prada, whom he met in 1999 when she asked him to redesign her stores, Koolhaas and his firm OMA have applied rigorous creativity to the runway. Together, they have: created modular and dispersed seating arrangements to question the front row pecking order; projected fake advertisements behind the catwalk; and created some of the COVID era’s most immersive and surprising video-show sets.
A week before the show, Koolhaas, along with OMA project architect Giulio Margheri, allowed GQ a rare peek into their creative process—which, as they described, essentially runs in parallel with Mrs. Prada’s (and now Raf Simons’s) own. Before Koolhaas and Margheri began working on the Spring 23 space, they were told that the themes of the season were “naivety, childhood and simplicity,” as Margheri put it in a Zoom call. Which is how they found their way to paper, the duo explained in a follow-up email: “Paper is a simple material, but it enables us to articulate an intention; it is the basic surface onto which we express our ideas. In this project we wanted to explore its qualities as an architectural element, almost like children would give shape to their imagination.”
Like Mrs. Prada, Koolhaas sees his creative practice as intimately connected to politics and social movements. The use of humble and 100% recyclable materials this season, he said, grew out of a “particular kind of resistance to luxury.” Which might seem ironic, considering the models strode out wearing trim wool suiting and tiny leather shorts which will retail for many thousands of dollars. But Koolhaas isn’t in the business of selling clothes; he’s in the business of, as he and Margheri put it, “conveying a mood, projecting a mentality.” They elaborated: “We’ve always shared with Prada a certain resistance to waste in the design of the show spaces…Now, more than ever in recent times, the idea of luxury finds itself at odds with the rising costs of fuel, food and construction materials. In a world where aggression is becoming increasingly present, we wanted to create a space that conveys softness and modesty.”
Though OMA designs the sets without seeing a shred of clothing, there is, of course, a mutual influence in the final result, according to Koolhaas. On Sunday, that influence became clear by the end of a strikingly boyish and simple Prada show. Compared to last season, which featured power shoulders and beefy bombers of the kind Drake adores, the Spring 23 silhouettes are abbreviated and abrupt, like they were made during a fabric shortage. The flashiest pattern was a humble and crafty gingham check, and four consecutive looks were crafted out of a workingman’s denim. The only accessory that carried even a whiff of hype was an exaggerated-toe western boot, worked and burnished to appear vintage. Luxury, sure—but in a way that screams awareness of luxury’s complicated implications in today’s world.
Now that the show is over, the clothes will be sent to showrooms and production facilities. And the set? It will be taken down and recycled, an effort that emerged out of what Koolhaas describes as OMA and Prada’s mutual interest in sustainability. “The value that they give to the creation of the space is really as important as the collection, to some extent,” said Koolhaas. As important is what happens once the viewers put their phones away and head to the next show.
GQ: Can you shed some light on the concept behind the paper and cardboard rooms you designed for the Prada show?
Rem Koolhaas: Well, what is interesting about designing the fashion show for us is that fashion has to be different every season. So on one hand, there is a kind of an obligation to change. And on the other hand, there is an ambition to be more or less relevant, or to agree, to support the thrust or the mentality of the show. And I think in this particular case, there was a particular kind of resistance to luxury and a huge effort in terms of transformation. So we had the idea of working in paper, and that then became the exciting, the source of excitement for us.
At what point in the process are you looking at clothing? Is the set design explicitly responding to the feeling of the collection, and what Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are doing?
RK: No. Basically, they give us hints and suggest certain themes. So for instance, 20 years ago, there was a show where Miuccia Prada said: a little bit twenties, a little bit Charleston, and maybe some old-fashioned bicycles.
Giulio Margheri: [This season] it was naivety, childhood and simplicity. The information that we have related to the collection is very abstract and based more on conceptual terms and wording. It’s never a response to something that has been shown and we try to design something around it. The process of the two things goes in parallel. So when we start designing the space, it’s not that they have a finished collection. We are seeing mostly one side of it—
RK: But the interesting thing is that there are last minute adjustments in both. And so there is sometimes a mutual influence. But it’s very, very hard to put your finger on.
This design specifically, reminds me a bit of old couture houses, where the audience would be seated in separate rooms and the models walk through doorways—
RK: Well, the interesting thing is that that kind of typology has been in recent conversations, so it’s a returning element and a strong model for us. Ironically, it’s a kind of model that I particularly like, because basically it was a show in a given environment that was not particularly adjusted or transformed for the show itself. So the decor itself didn’t want any attention for itself. I think that has an inherently beautiful and straightforward idea. We are constantly kind of checking what we are doing against that model.
Obviously the fashion sets are temporary, whereas a lot of the work you do at OMA is permanent. I’m curious if you use the opportunity to design these sets as an opportunity to experiment or implement new ideas, or to work with new materials. Is that part of the appeal of these projects?
RK: It’s hard to say whether there’s a kind of straightforward influence of the kind of shows on the work. I see it more as an extension of the range of an architectural office, which in a way makes working in this office in general more interesting.
GM: And of course it goes in parallel with what you’re saying: there is research of material, especially in large quantities that can be applied in space with quite a fast production. And most of the time, [we’re looking at materials that are] not very expensive. So that sometimes works as a catalog of different material that we’ve been exploring, or different ideas that then sometimes get applied on different scales in different ways on other projects.
But I think what is also interesting is what Rem was saying in the beginning, that there is this demand of having a new image that has to be renewed. There is not a big change in terms of program. The biggest change was now, during Covid time, when there were some new restrictions in place. But otherwise it’s the same program that gets repeated. So it’s more, how do you refresh or how do you completely change that image?
RK: It’s basically a challenge to ourselves, right?
GM: Yeah. It’s not an easy process.
RK: If you look at the kind of renderings that we made for any one show, I think that maybe the average number of representations would run at least 20 pages, right?
GM: Yeah. I think in general, there’s a good 10 options for the show that get rejected.
How much do you consider social media? Has that made it more of a challenge as you’re trying to develop new backdrops and new spaces to showcase the collections? Because you were designing shows for Prada before everyone had a phone with a camera on it. Has that caused a shift?
RK: I guess so. For instance, in the case of certain colors, it might be the influence of social media or, in a different definition, of what the money shot is. But I think it doesn’t have a profound influence. We are not making sets for Instagram.
Maybe there was an interesting moment [making the deep-pandemic video shows] when there was no public when we basically—and this is also kind of related to the interest in cinema on the part of Simons and Prada—that we began to think about the sets as studios, as movie studios. And we were then considering the sets in terms of what opportunities they gave to the camera and what kind of film could be made. That was an interesting moment because we could completely forget about the public and focus on that aspect. But that is not so much related to social media, but more to a new kind of artificiality or authenticity, which the presence of the public has to guarantee.
Has your collaboration with Prada changed since Raf Simons joined? Is he bringing in new or different ideas? How has that worked?
RK: It was always based on discussions, of course, with Miuccia Prada, but with maybe with a handful of collaborators as well. And now Raf is part of those discussions and obviously has ideas. With Prada there was a kind of, I don’t want to say routine, but really a back and forth, and now it’s sometimes more—how would you describe it?
GM: Well, there is a new voice. He’s very involved, and very interested in the design of the sets. He’s a fan of the process himself.
RK: And for that it has been very good, because it means we need to respond to other ambitions.
GM: It’s a conversation with one more voice at the table, which makes it more interesting. The value that they give to the creation of the space is really as important as the collection, to some extent. They’re fully involved in this process. It’s not that they delegate, or they’re just finding the concept. They want to see the update, they want to see the evolution of the mock-up in person, checking the materials, testing things. Last week, we were in the space testing how to move the paper on the floor to make the floor itself. They’re very hands on and engaged in the whole process. Both of them.
