Prada Enters a New Frontier of Retailing
Prada, the 70-year-old, family-owned leather-goods company that launched itself to the forefront of international fashion consciousness a decade ago with a must-have black nylon backpack, has big plans to change the face of shopping.
To do this, Prada has commissioned two of the world’s top architectural design firms, back-to-back winners of the prestigious Pritzker Prize, Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based studio, OMA/AMO, and the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron to “assist in the creation of a Prada universe” that will include four new flagship stores in Beverly Hills, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Referred to as “epicenters,” these mega-boutiques are designed to energize the Prada brand by securing its position on the cutting edge of fashion. The stores are conceived to be social laboratories that encourage interaction and exploration rather than mere consumption. Shoppers will become “researchers, students, patients, museum goers” in an environment that borrows elements of the theater, trading floor, museum and the street. In this new universe, luxury is defined by rough edges, intelligence and generosity.
“Retailing is not so much a consumption problem, but about communality,” says John Jerde, designer of Universal CityWalk and Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. “Rem’s idea of a Prada store where it’s being used for many, many things, even for people who don’t care about Prada shoes, is a pretty exciting deal--where commercialism becomes an extinct idea. The idea is to design the Life Theater that goes on, not repetitiously, predictably, so that it’s broadly based, with infinite possibility. Rem knows a lot about this.”
Although none of the stores is slated to open until September, Prada recently staged a well-attended exhibit in Milan of the works-in-progress of the two design teams. On display in the large, austere concrete space with vaulted ceilings designed by Tuscan architect Roberto Baciocchi for Prada’s fashion shows were a series of 1:1 scale models of design elements to be used in the new stores.
Arrayed on long tables and labeled with Post-It notes were working models for the projects, tracing the design process from the preliminary, carved blue foam blocks to models of the proposed designs, complete with floor sections and a small army of little plastic figurines. There were also samples of the highly tactile materials--foams, gels, casters, steel mesh and silicone mats--that will be used in the final projects.
The New York store, referred to as the Prada Guggenheim because it occupies the Guggenheim Museum’s former downtown location, routes researchers/shoppers through the 23,000-square-foot space. Customers enter down a wide flight of stairs that double as a shoe gallery during shopping hours, and a small, indoor amphitheater after-hours when a cantilevered stage can be lowered into the space for performances.
In keeping with the store’s laboratory function, the space is as flexible as possible. For example, Prada-green display cases suspend like a “hanging city” from a mechanical track that can be easily moved to quickly realign the use of the space. The walls will be covered with molded plastic foam with large bubbles that make it look like a sickly green Swiss cheese; wallpaper of street scenes or abstract graphics and unpainted bubble-gum pink Sheetrock that has been spackled and taped, softening the space with its goofy hand-painted stripes and polka dots.
The 21,000-square-foot Beverly Hills store on Rodeo Drive, set to open next January in an expanded version of its current location, uses a set of elliptically shaped, wading pool-like vitrines to draw the shopper under a large overhang and into the store where a pyramid of tiger-striped wood stairs faces out to the street. Intended as a (rather treacherous) place to try on shoes, the steps also evoke a university quad where students gather to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and plan the revolution while watching the world go by. Lateral spaces route the visitor around the central staircase and into a silver-lined tunnel that runs beneath it, or onto a mezzanine that allows the shopper to peer over the glass railing to the activity below.
The 44,000-square-foot San Francisco store will be in a nine-story tower with a perforated one-inch stainless steel facade over a glass entry and bisected halfway up by a glass midriff as if the building was wearing a bikini. The facade is backed by plastic foam that will allow Ben-Day dots of light to illuminate the sheer facade at night. The floor scheme is based on series of free forms that create a varied geometric template, which routes visitors through a maze of inconsistent and unpredictable spaces varying in tone from the chaotic to the contemplative.
Koolhaas has paid particular attention to the most intimate space in the store--using technology and optical effects to transform the changing booth into a scientifically enhanced environment that effectively deals with some of the logistical problems of getting naked in a public space. When empty, the transparent booth is a glass-enclosed void. Once inside, the shopper steps on a button to illuminate a sheet of liquid crystal that creates an opaque shield of privacy so that as the occupant becomes more exposed, the architecture becomes more clothed.
Taking advantage of the best of both bricks and mortar and e-commerce retailing, garments are hung in an electronic closet that allows the shopper to call up new colors and sizes from the stockroom without leaving the dressing room. Communication to the outside is by a prison phone, and a button that opens and closes the dressing room door a few inches to pass items in and out of the booth. Lighting scenarios can be changed to view garments in daytime, office, and evening light.
To resolve the eyes-in-the-back-of the-head problem of trying on clothes, the design team has supplied a motion-sensitive video camera, which delays and freezes slow movement on the screen the shopper can easily get a rear view. In Beverly Hills, this problem will be resolved with the electronically less-complicated, but equally inventive solution of a double mirror that allows for simultaneous side-by-side views of the front and the back.
Herzog & de Meuron create a totally different environment for the 21,000-square-foot Tokyo store, slated to open in 2002. A 1:1 scale section of the facade shows large bubbles of diamond-shaped transparent glass puffing out from the diagonals of the I-beam trusses. Photographs of the models show light filtering in through the transparent facade to create a luminescent interior space. Inside, fiberglass display cases glow brightly from the strands of white and colored fiber-optic lights embedded in their interior, creating a radiant ambience of intense and diffuse light sources.
Linda Herrman, boutique operations manager for Faconnable, a division of Nordstrom, remarked that “Prada is very brave. The designs break some of the basic rules of retailing. Stairs are the death of retailing, but Prada are brilliant merchandisers, and their customers have very strong brand loyalty.”
New York-based branding expert Peter Levine of d/g* worldwide says, “People are going to the retail environment looking for the next arena of experience, not just great-looking stores.” He notes, “Prada is not about appropriately fitting clothes. She [designer Miuccia Prada] is smart enough to know that her vision of cool is security cool. And she wants to raise the bar to get back into the conversations realm.”
Although implicit in the project of creating a consumer environment is the exchange of goods and services for payment, even if only to generate enough revenue to sustain the cultural functions of the space, nowhere in the exhibit or in its accompanying book, “OMA/AMO Rem Koolhaas Projects for Prada Part 1,” is there any discussion of the financially essential conversion of shopping to buying. Nor is there any mention how much this new Prada universe will cost to build.
Even the elaborate “customer management system” that outlines a time- and service-intensive process of using hand-held devices and “ubiquitous screens” to assist the customers from the moment they enter to the moment they leave the store, only one moment, “#28 Cashier,” is mysteriously designated as “T.B.D.”--to be determined.
