prada SPORT ep.24

Linea Rossa / Miuccia the Mime / the luxury of nylon / my frenemy, Norbert Schoerner

I really want to talk about Prada Sport.

I’ve wanted to talk about it ever since I found a pair of riding boots from the FW 1998 collection a few years ago and the strange sole and red stripe on the heel made me feel like a sporty little elf. I love feeling like a sporty little elf.

The urge only got worse when IDEA rereleased Norbert Schoerner Prada Archive 1998-2002 and I felt the type of joy/envy only perfect images can create. But what broke me is when I learned that Miuccia Prada went to mime school in Milan and went on to mime for five years.

So please, let me talk to you about Prada Sport. We can hold hands and travel back to ‘90s, together.

Norbert Schoerner, 1998

Prada Sport FW 1998

Let’s start with Neil. Neil Barrett joined Prada in the early ‘90s after calling up the CEO and suggesting that they do menswear and then, coincidentally, offering himself up for the role. Barrett expertly combined tailoring with technical materials, playing off the success of Prada’s Vela Backpack made out of industrial parachute nylon that had launched a decade before. And so, Prada Sport was born.

Photographed by Albert Watson, 1987

“Suddenly nylon started to look more intriguing to me than couture fabrics. I decided to introduce it to the catwalk and it challenged, even changed, the traditional and conservative idea of luxury. I am still obsessed with it.”

Miuccia Prada

Miuccia Prada, the head of womenswear and of wrong chic, brought the Prada Sport design codes from Barrett into her SS 1999 mainline womenswear collection. Swishy pants, weird little fannypacks and utilitarian chest straps made their way down the runway alongside iconic leather skirts and silk tops.

Prada SS 1999

A few months ago, I attended the NEMESIS Creative Strategy workshop (highly recommend). One of the many things I wrote down was that to truly get to the heart of a brand’s purpose “you must reduce everything to its most brutal contradiction.”

Prada Sport’s brutal contradiction is that it is wrong, yet chic.

Prada Lookbook, 2001

Prada Sport, also called Linea Rossa, for the iconic red label, was shown on the runway for three consecutive seasons: SS 1999, FW 1999, and SS 2000. And while today it seems second nature to combine technical materials with tailored silhouettes, at the time it was novel. Prada Sport set the stage for luxury sportswear collaborations like Margiela x Salomon, Jil Sander x Arc’teryx, and Gucci x North Face and the many others that have fueled hypebeast fantasies for years now.

Norbert Schoerner, 1999

Norbert Schoerner (the one whose images made me full of envy and joy, remember?), photographed the SS 1999 campaign. Set in a shiny cityscape, Prada Sport was made to be worn in Manhattan, not the mountains. In contrast, when Schoerner photographed the Prada FW 1998 collection, the dry-clean-only clothes were shot against a backdrop of sand and distant dunes. The subtext is that, in Prada, you transcend your surroundings.

Norbert Schoerner, 1998

All of this points to Miuccia’s punkiness, “Not punk in a superficial way, but in finding a way to change things, to go against the system.”

So Prada created a new system entirely.

Phil Poynter, 2001

Phil Poynter, 2001

The 2001 campaign emphasized uniformity and the power of the collective, with hundreds of models wearing the same white dress. Somehow both minimal and massive, individual and in sync, Prada Sport continued to play with the balance of its contradictions.

Miu Miu Photographed by Tyrone Lebon

And while the Miu Miu girl, bookish and accidentally beautiful, running Model UN in a mini skirt with a cardigan tucked into her tights, has become ascendant in trend and temperament over the last few years, I still want to try out for the varsity team. The Linea Rossa team.

I want tees made practical with built-in waterproof hoods, loafers cinched with bungee cords, and collared shirts made of nylon with grommets for ventilation. I want to feel like a sporty little elf, full of brutal contradiction and fit to play.

Prada Sport SS 2000

Here is a good resource for identifying and authenticating Prada Sport in case you need a new hobby or want to buy me a present.