Prada: After the Show
What would happen if you asked a group of design students to work with luxury materials from a fashion show?
With a focus on sustainability and environmental consciousness, Prada offered second and third-year Bachelor students from DAE’s Studio Identity the rare opportunity to work with high-quality faux fur. From 10th May to 2nd July this year, the students worked to give these materials—which usually appear for mere moments in the show—a second life.
Prada’s runway shows follow on from each other at an extremely fast rate. Each time, they require building new temporary stages, runways, and installations, which provide a lot of leftover material. Online design magazine Dezeen reported that “the materials used in the set will be up-cycled and repurposed, used in product displays and pop-ups for future Prada installations globally, and donated to Meta, a Milan-based circular economy project that offers sustainable solutions for waste disposal”. In April, Design Academy Eindhoven received 300 square meters of faux fur from the Fall/Winter 2021 menswear presentation. The students were given the assignment to repurpose the material in a new way, extending its lifespan and offering different potentials for its use. Alongside this, the students made a document in which they followed the birth and process of the material’s second life, and also curated and organised a group exhibition.
Students had to research all the different aspects of the donated faux fur, viewing it not purely as a skin, but as a material that requires multi-processing and handling, explained the studio leader Marty Lamers.
“The collaboration with Prada was a unique opportunity for Studio Identity, and fits so well with what we aim for within the studio: to seek connection with beautiful materials, and to connect between various roles," he said. "We have challenged the students to come up with a 'Gesammtkunstwerk' in which the variety of disciplines and diversity within Studio Identity emerge.”
The collaboration with Prada and AMO took place from 10th May until 2nd July, 2021, and was carried out under Covid-19 regulations. The students created a film with the results.
Video
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