Women Fashion Models and Designer

Tuesday night marked not only the re-opening of the recently fire-damaged Prada fashion exhibits flagship in New York, or “epicenter” as the company refers to it, but also the unveiling of its traveling exhibit, “Waist Down - Skirts by Miuccia Prada.”
The fashion exhibits, curated by Kayoko Ota of Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) - the firm that originally designed the $40 million, 23,000 square foot space - presents Miuccia Prada’s most iconic skirts since her inception in 1988.

Unlike some fashion exhibits, the show takes pains to present the skirts as works of art, showcasing them gallery-style on white foam pedestals or forging them into new oeuvres, camouflaging them on a wall-hanging of the same printed fabric they were cut from, vacuum packing them like bacon and hanging them on the wall or placing them on the lower half of a mannequin form so the skirts end up looking like lamp shades.

There are also “performing” skirts that come alive for spectators, thanks to hidden motors. Either they spin in the shop’s corners, or dance on the walls like invisible vaudevillians kicking their legs around underneath the pleats - this odd staging was made possible by a covert swinging pendulum.

Whatever the mode of display, the skirts shine in all their embroidered, heavily beaded, mirrored and feathered glory.
Had one not known the skirts were items of the past, they might just assume Prada’s merchandising team got a little crazy and presented the new collection in an awfully creative way.