NEW YORK: Italian fashion house Prada unveiled on Sunday 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.
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.
