Italian fashion house Prada unveiled on Sunday (June 7) the inner-layer garment set to be worn by Nasa astronauts heading into space, underscoring the brand's push to be the first major luxury player to make inroads in the space industry.
The body-hugging suit, created in collaboration with Houston-based space infrastructure developer Axiom Space, features ventilation tubes knitted into the garment.
"We have really a broad spectrum of capability and know-how," Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada's chief marketing officer, said at an event at Prada's Manhattan store, sitting beside a mannequin donning the new "liquid cooling and ventilation garment".
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Expertise for developing space exploration products "can come from lots of seemingly unrelated industries," said Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space.
The new product follows Prada's splashy foray into space fashion in 2024 with the unveiling of a spacesuit that is expected to be used for Nasa's Artemis 3 Earth orbit, set to launch in 2027, and the anticipated Artemis 4 moon landing in 2028.
Luxury brands have long drawn inspiration from space travel.
But Prada has gone "beyond inspiration into an actual partnership" as the space exploration and tourism industries develop, said Thomai Serdari, a luxury brand strategist and marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Serdari pointed to two factors motivating Prada's interest in the space industry: to gain access to affluent consumers who are contemplating space travel, and to align the brand with avant-garde thought.
Companies from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to Elon Musk's SpaceX have leaned into space tourism for the wealthy.
The resumption of space exploration and human travel to the moon is "bound to attract a lot of eyeballs", said Luca Solca, global head of luxury goods at Bernstein.
Luxury brands need to stay relevant and visible, he said.
Prada's push comes against a backdrop of a struggling luxury goods sector. After two years of contraction, the industry was showing signs of stabilisation until the Iran war began at the end of February, disrupting travel and denting luxury spending far beyond the Middle East.
Other fashion and apparel companies have jumped on the space bandwagon.
Under Armour has partnered with spaceflight company Virgin Galactic to create space apparel, while Columbia Sportswear has worked with space exploration company Intuitive Machines on space fabric technology.
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But it remains unclear whether other luxury players might follow Prada's lead.
"In luxury, it is important to be the first to do something, to be a trend-setter," Serdari said, noting that LVMH's Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Chanel are all interested in space travel but that they would likely find new ways to make inroads.
"You will never see the upper crust of the luxury sector copying each other," she added. – Reuters
