Something new has appeared on the fashion landscape.
In all fairness, I should illustrate just how appallingly bad a pun was just perpetrated by adding the clarifying information that the “something new” in question is a series of t-shirts from Prada which feature the floor plans and frontages of some of Prada’s most well known stores from around the world.
These are shirts for fans of architecture more than fashion. They celebrate Rem Koolhaas’ concepts for both the Los Angeles and New York stores, Herzog & de Meuron’s design for the building in Aoyama in Tokyo, and the structural delights of Prada’s outposts in Old Bond Street in London and Galleria and Montenapoleone Uomo e Donna in Milan.
As a slightly kitsch method of celebrating some of the designs from Prada’s “Epicentre Store” program (which launched in 1999 and merged retail and avant-garde architectural design into one, overall experience) the shirts are amusing. Though, at around three hundred dollars apiece, you can’t help but wonder if they may be a prime example of the type of conspicuous consumerism that, in the current financial climate, seems a little dated.
