PLANET PRADA

Sometime in the next few years, an astronaut will step onto the lunar surface wearing a cooling garment engineered, in part, by Prada, as part of the Italian house’s ongoing work with Axiom Space on NASA’s Artemis III spacesuit. Prada isn’t exactly the first fashion company in outer space — that distinction belongs to International Latex Corporation, which built the suits Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore on the moon in 1969. But it may be the first luxury brand to soft-tease its interplanetary ambitions with a week-long, satellite-themed happening at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. I am talking about Prada Mode, the house’s peripatetic private club, now in its fourteenth edition, which in early June 2026 transformed parts of the storied hotel into a kind of UFO control room, complete with spacecraft-shaped televisions and transmissions from another world. Previous editions have touched down in Hong Kong, London, Paris, Shanghai, Moscow, Los Angeles, Dubai, Tokyo, Seoul, Abu Dhabi, Osaka, and, of course, Miami, where the project first launched in 2018.

With each Prada Mode, Prada descends upon a city, takes over a culturally significant venue, and commissions a site-specific project from a major cultural figure to anchor two days of invite-only programming — talks, workshops, performances, dinners, and late-night gatherings — before opening to the public for a long weekend. Previous collaborators have included Kate Crawford, Theaster Gates, Damien Hirst, Trevor Paglen, Kazuyo Sejima, and Martine Syms. This year, Prada Mode came to New York City for the first time, staging Satellites II — an exhibition by Danish film director Nicolas Winding Refn and Japanese game creator Hideo Kojima — at the Hotel Chelsea to coincide with the 25th-anniversary edition of the Tribeca Festival.

Much of this year's proceedings unfolded like a star-studded transmission from Planet Prada, though less celebrity spectacle than a carefully assembled constellation of artists, filmmakers, musicians, performers, and Downtown New York icons. On the invite-only opening night, programming included a performance by punk provocateur Lydia Lunch, a talk with Grandmaster Flash, and a concert by Sophie Thatcher, whose conversation with Refn and Kojima, titled “Arrogance of Youth,” touched on the changing landscape of the entertainment industry and her role in Refn’s upcoming film Her Private Hell. There was also the Prada Mode Channel, a bespoke live broadcast filmed in the Hotel Chelsea’s themed rooms: an analogue-style cable station streaming talk shows, horoscope readings, and DJ sets, including one by William Benton, the hotel’s legendary doorman, who played records from the floor. Elsewhere, Hunter Schafer trying a version of Katz’s Delicatessen’s famous pastrami sandwich for the first time, a moment that quickly made its way to TikTok and Instagram (the menu for the night was curated by Sam Lawrence from Bridges). The sandwich was one of many served at the cocktail party at the New York institution, which also featured DJ sets from Grandmaster Flash, Justin Strauss, and Papi Juice, with Ziwe Fumudoh and Cole Escola among the guests.

Or at least that’s what it looked like from my social media. I couldn’t make it to any of the press previews or parties, so I went once the programming opened to the public, when Prada Mode hosted an anime festival at the Angelika Film Center curated by Refn and Kojima, alongside visual installations at Prada’s Broadway Epicenter and Katz’s Delicatessen. I visited the Hotel Chelsea installation on its final day, by which point the rooms that had served as micro television studios for the Prada Mode Channel broadcasts during the private programming had been converted into fully fledged art installations. One was decked out entirely in chrome, another in purple-tinged sky prints that looked almost projected from above, and a third was the UFO control room: a massive retro command center whose illuminated square buttons had a pleasing tactility, even if pressing them didn’t actually do anything. That room, apparently, is the one where Sid Vicious allegedly unalived Nancy Spungen in 1978 — although a medium booked as part of Prada’s cultural programming claimed it was actually a drug dealer who murdered her.

The central design highlight came in the next room over: a pair of midcentury-modern tube televisions, custom-built in Denmark, that looked futuristic and retro at once. The sets originated in the Tokyo version of Satellites, where six of them had been arranged around a recreated 1950s apartment, each retrofitted to resemble a small spacecraft; here, two had been transplanted into the Chelsea. On the screens, Refn and Kojima appeared in separate monologues, caught somewhere between hologram and spectral presence. Refn’s was in English, Kojima’s in Japanese, without subtitles. Refn talked about the screen as liberation: when he first came to the U.S. at eight or nine, he couldn’t speak English, so language registered as sound rather than meaning, and television became freedom — even reality. “I became obsessed with the screen,” he said, “and that has always been my objective: how do I control the screen through creativity? How do I flick the channels?” Kojima said it was an unusually direct thing for the two of them to do: to speak straight to an audience rather than filter themselves through their work.

On my way out, I tried the Prada-branded vending machine, stocked with mystery gifts that turned out to include a limited-edition cassette tape, a coloring book made up of silhouettes of Refn and Kojima to fill in with metallic pens, puffy stickers, and a set of pins. I played the cassette once I got home: an ’80s soundscape à la Tangerine Dream. As I listened, I thought about Refn’s obsession with the screen, which feels very different from the relationship most of us have with ours now. For Refn, the screen isn’t a tool of retreat or distraction, a device to soothe a busy mind or relieve the discomforts of public life back on Earth. It is generative: a place to build and inhabit. Something to think about the next time we get caught doomscrolling.