Prada CEO Andrea Guerra was smiling last week, flying high on the wings of Prada’s first 1 billion euros revenue quarter in history. “The brand is agile with drops and novelties but also a patient developer of iconic products that are paying off well,” Guerra said in a press announcement.

A prime example of Prada’s iconic products is the Galleria bag, designed and produced in 2007, and named for Miuccia Prada’s grandfather’s first shop in Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

The Galleria is beloved because of its signature Saffiano leather. Defined by its loosely crosshatched texture, Saffiano is the product of a patented, hot-pressing process that renders the calf leather scratch- and water-resistant and ready for a long and properous life.

The importance of reimagination is a key component to success in today's fast-changing, visually-dominated global fashion culture. This concept lies at the heart of Prada’s Summer 2023 ‘The Glass Age’ Campaign celebrating Prada’s iconic Galleria handbag.

Hollywood starlet Scarlett Johansson and Venezuelan-American conceptual artist Alex Da Corte collaborate on an unconventional examination of how the Galleria uses the power of color and modern art to connect us to Johansson as both herself and the bag in full emotional color. The duo is joined by designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons who reimagined the Galleria in limited edition colorways with creative direction by Ferdinando Verderu and art direction plus photography by Alex Da Corte [link]./ Hair by Jimmy Paul; makeup by Frankie Boyd; set design by Mary Howard

The campaign puts the human imagination's transformative power center stage. Understanding the literal concept of the glass age and Prada’s factory in Scandicci, outside of Florence, Italy helps us to fully understand and appreciate the campaign itself.

When we think of a leather factory, this white, modern glass building is not a typical vision even juxtaposed against new leather factories for Louis Vuitton, which retain an old-world, more organic atmosphere and architecture.

Inspired by doctors’ bags of the 1950s, the Galleria wasn’t ever a fashionable ‘it’ bag. Rather, Galleria was born with substance and purpose, a practical bag for no-nonsence women on the move with calendar-filled days.

Like the brutalist architecture conceived across Europe in the 1950s, the Galleria was designed as a support system and not an amusing handbag.

Artist and Prada collaborator Alex Da Corte was on a lecture tour in America focused on “the Glass Age”, when the brand reached out to him.

“In 1918, a technique called the Bicheroux Process eliminated long-held limits on the size of a sheet of glass, and with its invention the Glass Age was born,” said Da Corte to WWD. “It has been a period in which we desire through glass, and glass has in turn reflected, illuminated, isolated, incubated and elevated the objects of our desire. Glass did this first in the window displays of the grand shopping arcades of Europe, and it does it now through the screens in our pockets. The object behind the glass grows in power.”

Like the refracted colors in a reflection, Scarlett Johansson herself morphs as a character transformed by color evolutions in these images and the campaign film. The actor repeats the phrase “Our love is reds and yellows and blues and greens, our love is lavenders and browns and golds and grays,” as Johansson morphs across a fluctuating spectrum of engaging but truly detached emotional states. Around her, colors shift from place and hue, in a series of cinematographic executions to reflect and also distort our experience of looking at our own selves in mirrors or as reflected by a shop window.

Alex Da Corte (born 1985), as an artist who works across video, performance, installation, painting and sculpture is fascinated by reinventing objects that are familiar yet contested in order to explore notions of identity and humanity. The artist’s works have also been displayed internationally at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai; Kolnischer Kunstverein in Cologne; Secession Vienna and MASS MoCA North Adams among many other locations.

Da Corte came of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when DIY hedonism exploded onto New York art and nightlife scenes through DIY internet sites such as Myspace. Da Corte first displayed Rubber Pencil Devil at Prada Rong Zhai last year to demonstrate this ideal; its inaugural show provided an unforgettable sensorial experience as artists donned full body suits in order to embody over 50 popular culture icons like Mister Rogers, Popeye, Fred Astaire and even Satan himself!

Alex Da Corte uses popular culture, art history and modern design imagery as inspiration in his artworks, employing video, sculpture, painting and installation to assemble dense yet graceful assemblages using video, sculpture, painting and installation.

In less experienced hands these elements might appear garish or cartoonish to the senses — when neither actuality was the artistic goal. In this case the 42-43 year-old artist, who graduated from University of the Arts Philadelphia and holds an MFA from Yale, utilizes his knowledge of art history to create these characters perceived as richly-sensual yet emotive artistic experiences that are in total alignment with Prada’s DNA.

Da Corte's installations are dreamlike spaces in which logic is suspended and familiar figures and motifs reimagined. His recent project Rubber Pencil Devil entailed creating a 57-scene film featuring characters such as Eminem, Mister Rogers and the Wicked Witch of Oz displayed in an immersive Technicolor environment of carpeted floors, tiled surfaces, neon lighting and his quirky use of color to create an environment which blends suburban living room with plush strip club atmospheres.

The image below is from ‘Rubber Pencil Devil’ at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai, a gift to the city by Prada in a restoration completed in 2017.