Prada

Twenty-five years separate the zebrano wave ramp that Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren dropped into the former Guggenheim SoHo at 575 Broadway on 15 December 2001 from the 12,000 sqm Beymen flagship that Ellen van Loon and Iyad Alsaka have just slipped beneath the cast-iron columns of the Tersane-i Amire on the Golden Horn. Between those two openings sits a more or less continuous practice — OMA fashion retail architecture, plus the parallel AMO research studio directed by Samir Bantal — that has built the most recognisable luxury store typologies of the early 21st century. The Prada Epicenters defined the category in 2001 and 2004. The Repossi flagship at 6 Place Vendôme opened OMA’s jewellery vocabulary in 2016. T Fondaco dei Tedeschi reframed adaptive reuse for luxury retail the same year. Sotheby’s New York rewired the auction house typology in 2019. And, in 2026, the Beymen Tersane plants the practice on Turkish soil for the first time. ...

Jonathan Anderson opened his Dior on 2 January 2026 with a Book Tote embroidered as a 1955 first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — and that Book Tote, retailing at $3,550, is the most expensive single position in a market that the world’s twenty largest fashion houses are now actively publishing books to claim. The trigger for the dossier is Business of Fashion’s 1 June 2026 piece “How Books Became Fashion’s Favourite Flex”, which read Coach’s March 2026 ‘Explore Your Story’ campaign with Elle Fanning and the Dior Book Cover Collection as the same gesture. They are. They are also the smallest, most visible tip of a register that has been building since at least 1973, when Hermès printed the first German-language Die Welt von Hermès. This piece is an atlas of seventeen-plus programmes by the fashion houses publishing books in 2026, organised by what each programme is for. ...

On 8 June 2026, Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment — a form-fitting inner layer with a fully redundant water-cooling circuit — designed to sit beneath the AxEMU spacesuit on NASA’s Artemis IV mission, planned for 2028. It is the second deliverable from a partnership announced on 4 October 2023, and it is also the cleanest data point yet for a thesis FORMA has been tracking since the Fondazione Prada opened at Largo Isarco in May 2015: that Prada partnerships outside fashion are not marketing adjacencies. They are how the house has, for thirty-three years, built brand equity that runners-up in the luxury sector have not been able to assemble. ...

Theaster Gates’s June 2026 Freedmen’s Town Pavilion in Houston, co-designed with Sara Zewde of Studio Zewde, completes a sixteen-year arc that began in 2010 with the founding of Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. Read end to end, the Theaster Gates commissions catalogue is less a portfolio of artworks than a sustained argument that buildings — specifically the abandoned, the redlined, the bombed-out and the deconsecrated — are the strongest medium available to a Black American artist born in 1973 on the South Side. Stony Island Arts Bank, Huguenot House, Bristol’s Temple Church, the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion and the Houston pavilion belong to a single body of work, and the through-line is structural rather than stylistic. ...

Of the eight luxury houses with a dedicated publishing imprint in 2026, only one — Louis Vuitton — has run one continuously for more than two decades, starting with a seven-volume City Guides boxed set in a handmade leather sleeve in 1998. Every other operation on the map below — Hermès Éditeur, Chanel via Steidl, Dior via Assouline and Rizzoli, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Miu Miu, Burberry and now Coach — is younger, in most cases by fifteen years or more. The story of luxury publishing imprints in 2026 is how an industry that spent the 2010s collapsing into Instagram squares spent the 2020s rebuilding itself around printed objects: monographs, magazines, literary salons, micro-books on bag charms. ...

AMO opened a stone-carved supermarket inside the ME Milan Il Duca on 22 April 2026, and in doing so produced the cleanest summary in twenty-seven years of what the AMO design crossovers actually are: a think-tank that designs objects when the brief is to make a brand legible at one-to-one scale. The Il Sonno Supermarket, made with SolidNature for Designboom’s Room for Dreams programme at Milan Design Week 2026, stocks onyx bananas and travertine milk cartons on shelves under fluorescent light, twelve SKUs available to pre-order through SolidNature until 21 June 2026. AMO director Samir Bantal framed the installation as “freezing the idea of time.” The harder question the installation answers is one Rem Koolhaas opened in 1999 when Prada commissioned the New York Epicenter store: what does the research arm of an architecture firm do when it is not designing buildings? ...

Prada’s annual presence at Milan Design Week has always been more intellectually ambitious than most fashion brands. While competitors build immersive brand worlds and photograph-ready installations, Prada runs Prada Frames — a symposium on the relationship between natural environment and design that produces more thinking than content. It is an unusual strategy for a luxury house founded in 1913, and it works precisely because it does not try to sell anything. This year, alongside the symposium, Prada presents Chawan Cabinet — an exhibition of ceramic tea bowls crafted by Japanese potters and curated by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, one strand of Japanese design at Milan Design Week 2026. It is the most restrained and, ultimately, the most powerful fashion-house presentation in Milan this April. ...