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| Details of a wool felt skirt from the Prada fall 2006 ready-to-wear collection, viewable through two different magnifying lenses. |
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The Other Half
"Waist Down" puts the spotlight on Miuccia Prada's favorite pieces
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April 17, 2006 –
Last Thursday, a crew of multi-culti Prada staffers worked into the night at the company's Epicenter concept store in SoHo, exhibiting some of the fevered focus you see before a fashion show. No live models were involved here though. The team was testing the elaborate set of tableaux vivants that comprise the exhibit, "Waist Down: Skirts by Miuccia Prada." The show, which coincides with the reopening of the store after a five-alarm fire closed it on January 21, will be unveiled at a party for over 1,000 guests tomorrow night. It will then be on view to the public from April 19 to May 31.
"It's definitely going to be different than the previous cities, Tokyo and Shanghai" said Prada's Tomaso Galli, referring to the other locations where this traveling exhibit has been presented. "They've adapted the exhibition to the space." The show's roughly 100 skirts were selected by Miuccia Prada from collections dating back to 1988, and the installations, broken down into ten sub-categories, or "typologies," were conceived and designed by AMO, the creative think-tank led by Rem Koolhaas, who is also the store's architect.
Near the entrance hangs an army of 2D mannequins—cutouts of runway images cropped from the waist up and backed by mirrored panels. Inside the elevators, skirts become makeshift lamps switched on and off by foot pedals. Large swaths of fabric with matching skirts attached decorate the store's long north wall like Op Art tapestries. And in the middle of the Epicenter, on a stage lowered from the zebrawood-curved floor known as the "wave," nine mannequins required the attention of nearly as many assistants to arrange their skirts and give them each a proper pose. Come Tuesday, they will be dressed in elaborately embellished pieces that can be examined through dinner-plate–size magnifying lenses.
"The point is to be surprised," said Galli.
–Sarah Cristobal
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