Photo: OMA

This past weekend, Prada launched its 2012 fall/winter men’s collection at the OMA-designed Fondazione Prada in Milan. The show, which was broadcast live-via-webcam around the world Sunday afternoon, evoked the spirit of Loos and other early Viennese modernists, with one model even sporting Loosian cropped hair and accompanying mustache. Micro-print patterns, muted colors, and double-breasted overcoats were the order of the day. A troop of models, among whom could be counted actors Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe, soldiered across a retro-themed runway designed by AMO, which covered the stage with a 20-by-35 meter blood-red carpet emblazoned with 11 stylized flower shapes and bordered by an interlocking-block motif of black and white geometries. Six monumental chandeliers made of 300 neon tubes arranged in cubic forms lit the scene below, while the audience was pushed to the perimeter of the proceedings, cloaked in shadow. According to OMA’s website, the severe aesthetics, coupled with the space’s concrete vaults, were meant to connote the “grandeur of the palace.” Interestingly, the overall spectacle, sharpened by the exceedingly bright lights which render the pointed outline of the apparel and the hypnotic movements of the participants all the more vivid, recalls the decadent and implicitly menacing aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick’s films, from the erotic-occult world of Eyes Wide Shut to the horror of the Overlook’s red rooms in The Shining.

Oh hai, Adrien Brody. Photo: The Sartorialist

PRADA 2012 Fall/Winter Man from OMA on Vimeo.

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged 2012 mens, AMO, fashion, Loos, oma, prada, retro, runway, vienna

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