The Astronauts Don Prada | Vanity Fair

“This is what we call a made-to-measure suit,” said Lorenzo Bertelli, the Prada scion and its chief marketing officer and head of sustainability, at a New York media event on Sunday morning. He wasn’t speaking of the kinds of tailoring seen on celebrities like Michael B. Jordan on the red carpet or Harry Styles onstage, but of something endlessly more compelling: a space suit.

In 2024, Prada announced the first stage of its partnership with Axiom Space, the space infrastructure development company: the outer layer of a space suit to be worn by NASA astronauts somewhere in the near future. The suit—the technical name of which is Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU)—looked like an augmented version of the kinds of apparel we’ve seen astronauts wear in pictures and movies, except that it also featured the Prada logo and the red rectangular lines of its sportswear brand, Luna Rossa.

The Prada x Axiom LCVG inner suit.

The news made a splash at the time—why, of all things, would astronauts wear Prada to space, and could this be a serious endeavor or merely another case of inventive fashion PR?

After months of no spatial news from Prada, Bertelli touched down in New York this weekend to share the next stage of the mega-brand’s collaboration with Axiom Space: the inner suit to be worn by astronauts under the AxEMU unit. Its technical name is the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), and its purpose is crucial: to serve as the performance inner layer to protect astronauts from the elements as humanity ventures back to explore the lunar surface for the first time in over 50 years.

Prada has hosted fashion shows in under slime cascades and over terrariums, it has had actors from Louis Partridge and Hunter Schafer to Willem Dafoe and Gary Oldman walk its runways, and it was outfitted iconic films including Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Elvis (2022). Still, it has never done anything this cool.

The fashion world has long had a platonic relationship with the concept of space travel. In 2017, Karl Lagerfeld, the late German designer, staged his fall-winter ready-to-wear show that year around a life-size Chanel-branded rocket in the Grand Palais in Paris. The event featured a countdown, a pretend-lift off, and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” in its soundtrack. In 2023, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, the designers of Coperni, fashioned one of their popular Swipe bags out of a meteorite. And when Lauren Sanchez Bezos, Katy Perry, and more orbited the Earth as part of the endlessly memed Blue Origin mission, they wore snazzy, figure-hugging catsuits that were more reminiscent of a comic superhero’s grab (hello, Sue Storm in Fantastic Four) than astronaut apparel—they were designed by Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, the former Oscar de la Renta designers, for their label Monse.

And yet no brand has gotten as close to landing on the moon as Prada, a venture that is now well underway.

Bertelli spoke at a panel this morning joined by Axiom Space CEO and president Dr. Jonathan Cirtain and Russell Ralston, its SVP of spacecraft development, who explained the high stakes development of the suit, which is to be worn by astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis IV mission.

“This is the piece that’s closest to the astronaut and connects to the life support system,” Ralston said, explaining that the suit, which is knitted in gray yarn with red rectangular accents, and, according to Bertelli, feels like a “super comfortable, very nice pajama,” was developed to balance a number of factors and functions the garment has to support.

The inner and outer suits.

Closeups of the LCVG suit.

Unlike the Apollo missions, which always went to equatorial locations, Dr. Cirtain said, the upcoming Artemis missions will lead to the first human landing at the lunar South Pole. In layman’s terms, if the Apollo missions visited locations that were either always under the sun or in the shade, Artemis will explore a portion of the lunar surface that can be exposed to both in close proximity. “You can have one foot in the shadow and one in the sun,” Dr. Cirtain said. He explained that the temperature differential in such cases can be around 400 degrees, which means that the Prada and Axiom Space suit and LCVG inner garment have been designed to withstand such extreme conditions. “While aesthetically pleasing, this is a safety suit for these people,” Cirtain said.

Prada’s involvement was fundamental to the production of both the unit and the inner garment.

“We knew we had the know-how to deliver the hardware to Axiom [Space],” Bertelli said, “and they had the know-how to deliver the technology.” Prada’s research and development and production capabilities are what made it the right partner for Axiom Space. They have invested a billion dollars in the past 20 years since launching Luna Rossa in research and development for performance materials, Bertelli said. They also have production facilities able to work on such projects. “For a person in our supply chain to switch from making a suit to something like this is normal,” he said, “Prototypization is very normal in our supply chain.”

Prada is famous in the fashion industry for its vertical integration. “There is no sector in the world that is as vertically integrated as luxury,” Bertelli said. “From almost raw material to the product in the store, when you have to create a synthesis for a final product, you have all you need in the company.”

AxEMU outer unit first unveiled in 2024.

Dr. Cirtain said that he is often asked to explain the reasoning behind partnering with a fashion brand like Prada. “Prada leads the world in the development of soft goods and luxury items,” he said, “Why would you choose to do that on your own when you can work with the best?”

One can’t help but ponder that, in a not-so-distant future when the über wealthy travel to space for tourism or whatever else, Prada will have a leg up in the development of their holiday wardrobing.

And yet this partnership is a welcome reminder that fashion as an industry can engage with science and technology in meaningful ways—that it can imagine and invest in our futures, past trends, and the manufacturing of desire. While the initial announcement had surprised some in engineering, Bertelli said, it was not an entirely outlandish idea for those in fashion who are familiar with Prada’s forward-looking ethos. “[At] Prada we start an adventure and push boundaries without an agenda,” Bertelli said. “Sometimes you need to push boundaries without having a reason why.”

Dr. Cirtain said that the next step is to provide NASA with test suits as the agency gets closer to the launch of Artemis III in late 2027, which will, according to the agency’s website, “test integrated operations between the Orion spacecraft and one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin.” Plainly, Artemis III will prepare NASA for Artemis IV, which will be the first crewed mission to land astronauts on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. “We have 18 or so months for touchdown in space and the space station,” Cirtain said.

The AxEMU unit and LCVG garment will first travel to space in late 2027. And when humans land on the moon again for the first time in 54 years, they will be wearing Prada.

Up next, a Prada destination fashion show at the International Space Station? Don’t put it past the visionary Bertellis.

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