Envisaged as true architectural projects, the runway show designs developed by AMO permit a high level of creative experimentation that resonates with Prada’s innovative character.
Since their first collaboration in 2004, every year AMO – the research and design branch of OMA, the office founded by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas – designs the sets for the runway shows of the Milanese luxury fashion house Prada. Proposing issues like the relationship of spectators with fashion, the hierarchy of the industry, or the use of performative spaces, AMO’s projects transform industrial facilities like those in the group’s headquarters on Via Fogazzaro or those of Fondazione Prada – built by OMA in 2015 in an old distillery – into dazzling stages, turning the fashion shows into true sensory experiences protagonized by fashion and architecture alike. The design of the settings is not necessarily related with the collection presented, but seeks challenging the established conventions, placing the audience in an unexpected place or reinventing the way of walking down the runway. Through resources like lighting, materiality, or color, the catwalks evoke theater scenes, extreme landscapes, or futuristic atmospheres inspired by different cultural or artistic references that take spectators to an oneiric world.
The collaboration between AMO and Prada has turned the runway shows of the Italian fashion house into spectacular events that modify and alter the perception of the industrial spaces chosen to present the collections.
The catwalks are inspired in different artistic or cultural references like theater, the landscape, or the city, and take to the extreme expressive resources like lighting, material quality, or color.
600 cubes of blue foam create a uniform grid of seats where the audience watches the fashion show, multiplying the runway paths and transforming the point of view of spectators.
