Page turner

last updated 31 August 2022

Each season, the fashion world delights in trying to decipher the multifarious narrative brushstrokes in Prada’s collections. For her S/S 2018 menswear show, Miuccia Prada looked further into the notion of storytelling: the narrative of the Italian brand’s own collection was housed within a show set resembling a giant graphic novel.

The book worm-worthy set design was conceived by frequent collaborators AMO (the research arm of Rem Koolhaas’ OMA studio) and New York design studio 2x4. Comic book narratives by the illustrator James Jean and Belgian graphic artist Ollie Schrauwen covered the walls and benches of the space in Prada’s Milan HQ, imagined in black and white and with splashes of colour.

Their fragmentary excerpts, neatly contained within graphic novel style black-edged frames, erred on the everyday, featuring illustrations of post boxes, flowers and cups of coffee. A more disconcerting thread also ran through the pages, with laser beam-eyed monkeys and suburban homes being picked up by giant metal claws. What a page turner.

Jack Moss is the Fashion Features Editor at Wallpaper*, joining the team in 2022. Having previously been the digital features editor at AnOther and digital editor at 10 and 10 Men magazines, he has also contributed to titles including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Mr Porter’s The Journal and more, while also featuring in Dazed: 32 Years Confused: The Covers, published by Rizzoli. He is particularly interested in the moments when fashion intersects with other creative disciplines – notably art and design – as well as championing a new generation of international talent and reporting from international fashion weeks. Across his career, he has interviewed the fashion industry’s leading figures, including Rick Owens, Pieter Mulier, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Christian Lacroix, Kate Moss and Manolo Blahnik.