Colorful clothes become pure color, color challenges the classic form of the photographs. Freja Beha Erichsen Fronts ‘Painted in Prada’ Pre-Fall 2020 campaign.
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The Pre-Fall 2020 Prada campaign is engineered to react to a changing world, reflecting a fusion of the human hand and eye with technology – each equally important, a hybrid means of communication, expression and creativity.
Conceived and created alongside the Prada Fall/Winter 2020 menswear collection presented in January, for Pre-Fall 2020 color recalibrates classic garments, to give outfits a new actuality, a surreal ambiance. For the accompanying campaign, photographed in London on 13 February 2020 by David Sims and painted in New York during the following weeks, physicality is questioned: the collection’s vibrant colors are isolated, abstracted, pushed center stage, highlighting their material essence and their disarming simplicity.
The images and campaign films combine hand-painted watercolors with digital artistry. David Sims’ black and white images of Freja Beha Erichsen act as monochrome canvasses for a subsequent intervention, creative expression via saturated color, applied with improvised spontaneity over the image. The silhouettes of the clothes, their seams and patterns, become ‘paint by numbers’ frames for energetic explorations of color – a dozen Prada-ist shades of Celeste blue, pink, yellow, orange, green and more.
The campaign films propose another twist, transforming the model into the maker: Beha Erichsen determines her own image, her own authorship, brushing color onto her clothes and accessories in a surrealist gesture, simultaneously bringing them and her to life. These films will also give life to a multi-layered narrative through digital portals and Prada Instagram.
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At a moment where our experience of society and culture is defined by the picture plane – computers, phones, television and magazine pages – with people at a remove from one another, this campaign takes inspiration from the accidental, the imperfection of handcraft and the unfinished nature of human interaction. Blurring lines between the photographic and the painterly, between technology and humanity, it is a subconscious echo of our moment. The joy of color via the joy of technology – both a means of communicating a message, immediately. Ultimately, that message is positivity – a fantasy, painted in Prada colors.
Last week, the Prada Group reopened its production sites in Tuscany and welcomes back its employees in a safe environment.
Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Group’s CEO: “In this emergency situation we have not only been considering when to reopen but above allhow to reopen in total security. We immediately sought advice to safeguard the health of our employees with the virus-screeningprocedures. The introduction of these measures means we can now confidently restart production in Tuscany, and look forward toextending the protocols to our plants and offices in other regions, when they reopen”.
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