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For all of these reasons, one supposes it's fitting that Miuccia Prada sought out Koolhaas and associates to design three new "epicenter" stores for the company--in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco--and to create Prada's Web site. They've documented that collaboration in this hefty, molto stile paperback that illustrates how they've rethought the shopping experience in ways both high-flown (in NYC, a shoe section that converts to a theater for performances and other "non-shopping events"; an electronic customer-identification/service system that either promises or threatens to track shoppers and their "needs" more closely than the FBI's) and cleverly common-sensical (dressing rooms with simultaneous, digitally-produced front, back and side-views, phones for requesting another size, and walls you can shift from translucent--so you can model for your friends--to frosted, for privacy).
Design-wise, the stores say "Koolhaas" as we know him so far--the facade of the San Francisco one, for example, is all perforated-looking metallic grids, and elsewhere there are shiny, swooping ceilings and walls, plus glass elevators that hover among glass floors like huge floating rooms. But most of what we see in this book is funky, moody photography of the sites' models, thickly populated by white figurines with the same unsmiling hauteur of Prada's sexy real-life runway models (not enough of which are featured here, by the way). The book's minimal text, though boldly designed, strikes a strange note somewhere between the usual half-cryptic semio-speak of Koolhaas's other books, and the oppressive language of corporate self-promotion ("Our ambition is to capture attention and then, once we have it, to hand it back to the customer."). But then, isn't that as it should be? With both Koolhaas and Prada, you often suspect that their recent stranglehold over American fashionistas and theory-queens alike is of great amusement to them. Between these pages, the joke once again might be on us, but who can't take a little joke when it's as stylishly presented as it is here?--Timothy Murphy
Expansion can be measured on two levels: quantity and quality.
On the level of numbers, there are simply more and more Prada stores; on the level of scale, Prada is about tot launch a number of special epicenter stores.
The danger of the large number is repetition: each additional store reduces aura and contributes to a sense of familiarity. The danger of the larger scale is the Flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious that eliminates the last elements of surprise and mystery that cling to the brand, imprisoning it in a 'definitive' identity.
But expansion can also be used for a strategy of permanent redefinition of the brand. By introducing two kinds of stores - the typical and the unique - the epicenter store becomes a device that renews the brand by counteracting and destabilizing any received notion of what Prada is, does, or will become. The epicenter store functions as a conceptual window: a medium to broadcast future directions that positively charges the larger mass of typical stores. (REM KOOLHAUS)
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