Italian luxury house Prada opened its ‘Pradasphere II’ exhibition on 7 December in Shanghai, as the firm sets its sights on mainland China for expansion in 2024.
Located at the Start Museum, on Ruining Road, in the Xuhui District, Pradasphere II is a public exhibition that traces the history and culture of Prada from its origins in 1913 to the present day. Told through a selection of stories curated by co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the exhibition showcases 400 artefacts — both physical and digital, drawn from the fashion archives, as well as decades-long engagements across art, architecture, culture, and sport.
Staged as a ‘Magazzino’, the Italian word for warehouse, the Pradasphere II exhibit was designed in collaboration with 2×4, the New York City and Beijing-based design studio, and serves as a cross-section of the Prada world; constructed of industrial warehouse shelving lined with precious pink silk velvet, and sectioned into different areas.
Running through the exhibit is the main ‘Magazzino’ corridor, showcasing nearly 200 looks from Prada’s collections. The corridor serves as the gateway to an array of special rooms, each designed to evoke uniquely Prada spaces, including ‘Fratelli Prada’, a recreation of a fragment of the original Fratelli Prada shop in Milan, made up of super-high-resolution videos of original objects and recreations of murals commissioned by Mario Prada in the early 1920s.
Other themed rooms include ‘Prada A Milano’ showcasing photographs by Albert Watson and specimens from Miuccia Prada’s earliest Nylon collection, and “Gallery”, featuring new artworks by Damien Hirst alongside iconic handbags from the Prada archive.
