MILAN — At Prada, leather goods are “a symbolic a part of its history and future,” said the group’s chief executive officer Andrea Guerra last week, as the corporate reported that for the primary time it generated quarterly sales of greater than 1 billion euros.

“The brand is agile with drops and novelties but in addition a patient developer of iconic products which are paying off well,” said Guerra.

Working example, the Galleria, first conceived in 2007, has change into a successful carryover signature bag, and Prada is once more highlighting this design through a recent impactful campaign fronted for the primary time by Scarlett Johansson and art-directed by Venezuelan-American artist Alex Da Corte.

In an interview with WWD, Da Corte explained that Prada reached out to him while he was on a lecture tour within the U.S. talking about “the Glass Age,” and this triggered a desire to further investigate the subject.

“In 1918, a way called the Bicheroux Process eliminated long-held limits on the scale of a sheet of glass, and with its invention the Glass Age was born,” said Da Corte. “It has been a period during which we desire through glass, and glass has in turn reflected, illuminated, isolated, incubated and elevated the objects of our desire. Glass did this primary within the window displays of the grand shopping arcades of Europe, and it does it now through the screens in our pockets. The item behind the glass grows in power.”

In a serendipitous turn of events, the arcade has a special meaning for Prada’s signature bag, sleek yet functional, named after the situation of the brand’s storied flagship in Milan — the luxurious shopping arcade Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, where founder Mario Prada, Miuccia Prada’s grandfather, opened his shop in 1913.

Da Corte pulled images from the past 150 years, fascinated by “the body and its reflection.”

A Tony and BAFTA award winner for “Lost in Translation,” and two-time Academy Award nominee for her roles within the drama “Marriage Story” and the satire “Jojo Rabbit,” Johansson’s skills in embodying different identities are channeled into the campaign as she is seen always transforming, with different hairstyles and appears.

“I’ve been an admirer of Alex’s work but never imagined I might ever have a probability to collaborate with him,” said Johansson. “With the ability to work in a multimedia context with him, using the design elements of Prada’s collection to create characters which are a part of a piece on love and self-reflection was truly exhilarating. The environment that Alex created inspired by Prada’s color story and aesthetic was very very like performing within a chunk of art. It was a singular experience I feel so proud to be a component of.”

Color, a fil rouge in Da Corte’s art, is a key element within the photos, drawing on Pop and Surrealism, on the set of windows, stairs, tables and mirrors, and within the bag itself, revisited by co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons.

The pictures reproduce the words: “Our love is reds and yellows and blues and greens, Our love is lavender and browns and golds and greys,” that are also spoken by Johansson in a brief video.

Da Corte’s works span a variety of media — video, performance, installation, painting, sculpture — and that is his first project in a fashion context, although he confessed he knows “nothing about fashion, I might just all the time wear a sweatshirt,” which indeed he donned during a Zoom interview.

Da Corte was influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s thoughts: “If we have a look at a stunning, altogether colorless object, it makes a powerful lasting impression, and its after-vision is accompanied by the looks of color.”

“The Glass Age is an era during which our world is formed through physical and metaphorical windows, from shop windows to screens; within the Glass Age we animate the objects of our desire through our attention, we give them life behind the glass,” continued Da Corte. “Glass can also be a mutable network for infinitely connecting the world, the way in which we see the world, and the imaginary. Glass is an aid in the event of fantasy. The product is an icon and the topic is an icon, becoming all she might be, in all her complexity.”

Asked about working with Johansson, Da Corte said he was “all for Scarlett as a contemporary icon, and the way she succeeds in embodying different personas — a bit like glass. She is a implausible performer, it was amazing to look at her work.”

Da Corte said he was given carte blanche by Prada and Simons. He met the previous about 10 years ago. From November 2020 to January 2021, his site-specific intervention “Rubber Pencil Devil,” supported by Fondazione Prada, was exhibited at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai.

Da Corte is currently the topic of “Fresh Hell” on the twenty first Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. His most up-to-date film “Roy G Biv” premiered on the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

As reported, in the primary quarter of the 12 months, sales of the Prada group’s leather goods category rose 14 percent at constant exchange rates to 434 million euros, accounting for 46 percent of the entire within the period.

In 2021, Prada launched its first campaign focused on a handbag and a single product: its statement Galleria bag, back then fronted by Hunter Schafer, and directed by Canadian actor, film director and screenwriter filmmaker Xavier Dolan.

Through the years, the bag has been reinterpreted in several iterations, and stays amongst Prada’s bestsellers.

The bag was originally offered in Saffiano leather — a scratch- and water-resistant calfskin defined by a crosshatched surface texture, a cloth patented by Mario Prada and still a leitmotif of the brand today, created via an intricate hot-pressing process; raw edges are smoothed and painted by hand to match.

The Galleria bag consists of 83 pieces, combining industrial precision with manual craftsmanship.