If You’ve Got It, Sell It.
As Prada unveil their new Spring/ Summer collection, their global takeover bid reaches new heights, with surprising locations selected for new store openings.
Prada’s latest offering, the Spring/ Summer collection, is unveiled this week in the Via Fogazzaro show space in Milan amid a backdrop of vast store expansion for the designer clothing brand, which has seen a swath of new shop openings in the last year. Recently acquired locations include Panama, Saudi Arabia, Salzburg, Wuhan and Johannesburg.
The stores are designed by renowned architect Roberto Baciocchi and aim to preserve the cultural identity of the cities they are situated in, for example through the inclusion of separate male and female sides of the Saudi Arabia store. All of the stores contain separate men’s and women’s sections with the furnishings and designs juxtaposing them, although these are not fully separated as in the Saudi Arabia store. The architectural identity of the building occupied is also taken into account, with Prada deciding to preserve ‘the elegant wooden staircase, the vaulted ceilings, the restored wooden furniture and the original cash register’ present in the Salzburg shop, which were designed ‘in full respect of the spaces, integrate with the existing architectural elements of this historic store’.
The Johannesburg store is perhaps the most glamourous in design, boasting a ‘“Diamond Walk”: a backlit white canvas curtain enclosed in a crystal box creates a sophisticated atmosphere’ and ‘Black marble frames border the entrances, windows and light boxes, lending a precious flair to the space’ all of which is designed, according to Prada’s press release, to emphasise ‘elegant geometry’.
Several of the stores also have ‘the signature black-and-white marble chequered flooring – a legacy of Prada’s identity worldwide’, which is a hangover from the first Prada store ever opened in Milan and makes a dramatic visual impact when entering the stores.
The new stores will stock Prada’s ‘Ready-to-Wear’ collections for both men and women, as well as a range of accessories and foot wear and the leather goods which initially established Prada as an international designer brand.
