Word: fabrics
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Prada's penchant for mixing luxurious traditional fabrics with new high-tech fibers has been consistent over the past decade, but from season to season, her eye will veer from very traditional fabrics like duchess satin to something unconventional like the novelty fabrics she used in the early 1990s when mills were introducing technology from the athletic-wear industry. But in Prada's hands even those fabrics were not used in a traditional way: nylon replaced leather for bags; it became shiny, luxurious and embroidered for evening coats; or it was woven with purer yarns like cashmere to give...
Every season, her collection starts once Prada has chosen a concept. Then she will turn to different fabric mills and ask for special treatments of fabrics that interest her (90% of the fabrics are created exclusively for Prada). The mills will come back with 25 or more variations on her request. "That is the real luxury of being a big fashion company. When you are big, the quality is better," she explains. For the average women's fall-winter collection, she will focus on as many as 50 different fabrics, eventually narrowing the final selection down...
Prints and historical references to prints are a large part of Prada's fabric research, and she draws on her archives, which include endless shelves of swatch books dating back to the 1800s and early 1900s as well as old fabric stocks that she has bought out and stored in warehouses in Tuscany. For fall 2003, Prada snapped up a huge lot of Art Nouveau and 1960s psychedelic prints from the Savile Row tie company Holliday and Brown, which she incorporated into men's and women's collections and then used for further inspiration, taking later copies of the prints...
...very fine thread and then a computer-graphic print that was inspired by images of 18th century ruins. Using pixelated computer screen grabs, she reprinted copies of the original images onto faille and brocade, giving them a moiré effect. The final print had a high-tech feeling, but the fabric was traditional...
...other seasons, Prada will return to the authentic way of making a very pure fabric. For years she wanted to develop a traditional gold cloque and lamé of the quality that came out of the French mills in the 1960s, but the reproductions didn't have the weight and quality of the vintage fabrics. So Prada dispatched a team of researchers to one of the original mills in France, and 10 days later, using old machines that had been out of service since the 1960s, they reproduced exactly the same fabric with the kind of quality she was looking...