Prada is shooting for the stars — or rather, the dark side of the moon.

On Sunday morning, Prada and Axiom Space invited guests to the brands’ SoHo flagship in Manhattan to show off the latest in the duo’s partnership. 

The two unveiled the high-performance Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment, or LCVG, to be worn by astronauts inside the Axiom mobility unit space suit. Pending NASA’s approval in the upcoming weeks, astronauts, more immediately, are set to wear and test the new suits at the International Space Station. 

Prada said the LCVG draws on the brand’s expertise in creating knitting and innovative design concepts, with this next-generation garment crafted by using 3D modeling to help maintain cooling and ventilation as well as enhanced comfort for up to eight-hour spacewalks. With its high-performance materials, Prada has identified and sourced fabrics with thermal regulation, comfort, reliability and suitability for continuous wearing of the garment on missions. 

After going through a series of prototypes, the unveiled LCVG is the latest iteration ready for space. When NASA’s Artemis IV makes its return to the moon —this time to the South Pole — next year, the LCGV will be worn by astronauts. On Monday, at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, NASA is set to reveal the crew who will be on board for 2027.

Following the panel, Lorenzo Bertelli sat down for an interview with WWD alongside Jonathan Cirtain, chief executive officer and president of Axiom Space, and Russell Ralston, senior vice president of spacecraft development at Axiom Space.

Bertelli said the decision to launch the suit in New York was a “nice coincidence” that aligned with Prada Mode’s first New York iteration and the upcoming 2026 World Cup starting on Thursday. Prada, like many household-name luxury brands, is focusing on the U.S. with strategic interest.

Maybe it was mere coincidence, but the theme for Prada Mode’s installation was certainly on brand with the news — Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima were tapped to create an immersive installation inside the Hotel Chelsea, titled “Satellites II,” as a follow up to “Satellites,” which launched in Tokyo last summer. 

Prada first announced its collaboration with Axiom Space in October 2023 and then presented the outer spacesuit in October 2024 at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan for the Artemis III lunar mission.

“The last time boundaries were really pushed hard in the space industry was the Apollo mission [from 1961 to 1972],” Bertelli told WWD. “The [missions] changed the world. But we stopped exploring the moon and moved to just orbit around the Earth. We’re now seeing a new age of space exploration that’s [partly] motivated by the current geopolitical environment. We’d like to see if there’s an opportunity and potential for the future.”

Prada follows in the footsteps of a long history of fashion’s fascination and affinity for space  — André Courrèges, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin are just some of the designers who were notable for the crossover during the late 1960s and the Space Age. 

Indeed, this is not the first time Prada has cultivated ties with the tech industry — Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, sat front row in February in Milan for the Prada fall 2026 show.

Bertelli spoke about his mother, Miuccia Prada, and his father, Patrizio Bertelli, both innovators in their own right, which has driven the brand’s ethos. This partnership between Prada and Axiom Space shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to its industry peers, Lorenzo Bertelli said, given the brand’s renown for the unconventional.

“If my mother could do things without selling bags, she would do it,” Bertelli explained. “If my father could do the America’s Cup without selling bags, he would do it. The end goal for the Prada brand is never to solve a product but to do something else; it’s a medium. For us, it’s part of the journey of the brand to keep pushing boundaries, exploring the limits and giving the people our perspective. As a family, we simply like to do nice things, get inspired by our capabilities and give our point of view.”

Cirtain also pointed out that while Prada has been around since 1913 and Axiom Space was only founded a decade ago, the two companies saw more commonalities than they both initially anticipated. One of the major synergies between the two is their focus on “process.” The need to explore was also a major parallel — for Prada, the focus being on culture, arts and fashion and for Axiom Space, the resources of outer space.

Moreover, what made Prada an attractive partner for Axiom Space was the brand’s end-to-end vertical integration and operations management of its entire supply chain: from sourcing to final product. Moreover, Cirtain repeated the proverb as an overarching philosophy that “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together.”

“Prada has developed artisans that [have spent] 30 to 40 years in the company,” Cirtain said. “They develop extraordinarily high-quality materials from the sourcing of that material to the delivery of the consumer good — and that same attribute is required if you’re going to successfully and safely fly humans to outer space. As a start-up, you can’t cut corners [when] flying people to space successfully. There’s no tolerance for fault. We intentionally built our company following a process that was substantiated on the successes of agencies globally and industries globally.”

Bertelli, a former racecar driver, also likened the design of the spacesuits to Formula 1 cars — “when design is driven by functionality, it’s rare that it doesn’t look good. A car that looks nice is usually fast.”

Surprisingly, the tailor-made spacesuits don’t take nearly as much time for Prada to manufacture as its custom-made looks do. Bertelli said that 500 hours usually go into the creation of them, which is “two or three times more than the amount of hours required here for the spacesuits.” 

Cirtain half-jokingly mentioned that the competition among all the astronauts to be the first to wear the new Prada suits remains fierce. And Bertelli, who is scuba dive-certified, offered himself up to test the spacesuit by diving into the swimming pool.

“The vision of the brand has always been not just being a product brand. Prada has so many facets and expresses itself in so many ways. We’re not a museum, but rather a cultural exploration. We like to push boundaries in whatever we do — from the design point of view, technology and more. We want to give our perspective to the community and people within our ecosystem and our world. It’s another perspective on how we see things. This is part of the really unique DNA of the brand of Prada,” Bertelli concluded.