Allow us to be catty for one brief moment. Paula Abdul is an inebriated one-hit wonder who’s probably best known for being a soppy judge on an overrated reality TV show. But she’s actually wise beyond her ‘tears’ and we’d like to suppose that Miuccia Prada might have even paid some attention to this lovable lush’s advice when she said, “Everyone is your best friend when you are successful. Make sure that the people you surround yourself with are also the people that you are not afraid of failing with.”
That’s because in 2001, Miuccia Prada took a very big and expensive gamble. Not that it failed. Rather, it formed an everlasting synergy between the worlds of haute couture and starchitecture. In hiring Rem Koolhaas, a pioneering figure in the arena of urban architecture, to design her SoHo store in Manhattan she set a precedent. A genius one too because it affirmed Prada had surpassed fashion and was now a bastion of culture. And why not? After all, architecture serves the same purpose as advertising in terms of communicating a brand.
Many of her competitors have followed suit but that did not temper Prada’s enthusiasm. In 2003, she hired another Pritzker prize winning architecture firm, Herzog & de Meuron, this time to create what would turn out to be one of Tokyo’s most iconic retail structures, the Prada Epicentre in Aoyama on the corner of Omotesando and Miyuki. It’s a 33-metre high building with a honeycomb façade, built out of wedge-shaped elements that frame flat, convex and concave windows.
“The Prada Epicentre is about light and about public space and about cheering you up in a sensual, simple way,” Jacques Herzog said at the time. “Prada hired us in order to get something they didn’t expect.”
And that’s exactly what she must have been aiming for once again when she rehired the duo, this time to make a cool Tokyo store for her other brand, the one with all the creative freedom - Miu Miu. Unveiled at the end of March, the two shops are actually in close proximity but in contrast to the transparency of the all-glass Prada building, Miu Miu has an understated opaque metallic surface, which lends a more intimate, if not mysterious quality.
“Over the past decade, the distinctive Prada Epicentre has become a much-frequented location and it was therefore important to take this into account in planning the Miu Miu store, located in the immediate vicinity, on the opposite side of the street,” said the architects. “We started out by trying several different architectural typologies. Since zoning regulations called for less height, we explored the potential of a smaller, more intimate building. We used the following thoughts to channel our ideas: more like a home than a department store, more hidden than open, more understated than extravagant, more opaque than transparent.”
We think it’s a masterpiece of design. And something that’ll fit in perfectly with its equally famous neighbours on Omotesando, like Jun Aoki’s Louis Vuitton, Toyo Ito’s Tod’s, Sejima and Nishizawa’s Dior and Tadao Ando’s Omotesando Hills. All have the common denominator of extraordinary detailing and an awe-inspiring complexity of design that could only be built in Japan, where a tradition of faultlessly precise construction and obsessive shopping merge almost as congenially as Paula and spirits!
