Word: prada
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Another source of inspiration is embellishment?something that Prada has been refining for years. "To do something new, you have to combine fabrics," Uslenghi explains. "You bond different fabrics, fuse them together." Looking even further ahead, to spring 2008, he says textile mills are using lots of sculpting and etching techniques that create a kind of bas-relief effect on fabric. A traditional, rich fabric like silk shantung, for example, will be woven with very coarse yarn and linen hemp so that the surface looks embroidered, "almost in an arte povera way," Uslenghi says...
...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...
...sometimes the process is not as smooth as she envisions, and last-minute mishaps can cause snags in the creative process. For the spring 2007 Miu Miu show, for example, Prada had the idea?researched in her historical archives?of using a heavy, old-fashioned, expensive silk satin. "We printed so much, and afterward we realized that only one worked," she says. In the end she created an entire collection out of two fabrics: printed satin and plain satin. "We reprinted them three days before the show! It was a big drama...
Prints and historical references to prints are a large part of Prada's fabric research, and she draws on her archives, which include endless shelves of swatch books dating back to the 1800s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...