Prada on the Moon

Fashion designers have long imagined garments for outer space. Costume designers Jacqueline West and Bob Morgan dressed Dune’s Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet for the barren lands of Arrakis. Thierry Mugler presented a slew of fantastical women in his 1997 Fall/Winter couture show, which closed with the spawning of his own creature, at once fish, bird, and beast. However, no fashion house has gone so far as to engineer practical gear for an interstellar mission. That is until Prada unveiled its current project this week at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan in partnership with Axiom Space, the Houston-based private provider for space infrastructure contracted by NASA. In a first, the luxury fashion house designed the spacesuit astronauts will wear on their first-ever mission to the Lunar South Pole, which is slated to occur as early as 2026.

The Axiom and Prada pairing grew out of a shared mission to engineer a piece of cutting-edge technology that will look aspirational on the lunar stage, as spacesuits did in the 1960s and ‘70s. While the house’s recent Spring/Summer 2025 collection featured intergalactic eyewear, the spacesuit more closely echoes Prada’s legacy sportswear collections. A sleeker, sportier vision, the suit is not overtly patriotic. White fabric cascades over the shoulders in a series of folds. Four long, crimson rectangles run along each arm, across the torso, and over the helmet in an inspired nod to both the U.S. flag’s stripes and the eponymous red line of Prada’s iconic Linea Rossa collection. Gray accents on the elbows, kneecaps, and hips, are a more muted take on the memorable Americana colorway that graced the 12 men who walked the Moon’s surface more than 50 years ago. 

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Now, decked in the new Prada uniform, a crew including the first woman and the first person of color to land on the moon. Two astronauts will embark from the spacecraft to explore the lunar surface for the first time since 1972 as part of the month-long Artemis III mission. The pair will remain there for about a week exploring and documenting the terrain to retrieve samples and collect data. And what better way to do that than in Prada.