Page turner

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.