Prada Caffè
In London, fashion can take the shape of pastry, and luxury can be found at the price of a cup of coffee.
Category: Food & Wine
Location: London, England
Fashion is a symbolic value, only temporarily manifested in clothes. This is why every season, a new collection is presented; fashion moves from collection to collection, transforming your previously trendy clothes into yesterday’s news. The phenomenon of fashion – expressed through the passing of trends and sudden shifts in taste – has fascinated people ever since its invention in the 14th century, at the royal courts in the south of France. The world of fashion has a gravitational pull on people who want to be part of its glamorous world, presented through advertisements, films, and glossy magazines.
Many brands even create their own branded universe, carefully curated spaces that align with the creative direction orchestrated by the designer.
Few other brands succeed with their branding strategies like Prada. When Miuccia Prada first took over reins of the family business, she based her design strategy in a kind of opposite thinking. The most luxurious material at the time was leather, so she designed nylon bags. Shoes were supposed to be elegant and slender, so she purposefully made them clumsy and chunky. And when everyone tried to find a new style by “inventing” grunge, she instead turned to recent fashion history, finding inspiration in the geometrical prints of the 1960s, thus creating the style of the 90s. By doing everything her own way, she eventually became the one everyone else wanted to follow.
At Harrods in London, you can now participate in the Pradasphere even without buying a single garment. In line with the logic of fashion (not a physical commodity but a symbolic value) Prada is here presented in the shape of a café. Instead of bags you have pastries and rather than shoes you can buy chocolate. In a way, it’s a play with fashion’s infatuation with change, as the lifespan of fruits and berries is even shorter than it is for a fashion trend in the age of social media.
Prada Caffè is open between 9am and 9pm seven days a week. We recommend coming early, when you have the space almost entirely to yourself.
London, UK