September 18, 2025 |
London, sharpen your gaze: Prada Mode is back, and this time, it’s watching you watching it. From October 15-19, the 13th edition of Prada’s itinerant cultural club will unfurl at Town Hall, King’s Cross – the newly restored Grade II-listed landmark, all striking sculptural staircases and civic gravitas, now recast as a stage for Prada’s signature blend of art, intellect and glamour. Perfect timing too: it coincides with Frieze London, meaning the art crowd can double their spectatorship.
At the centre of Prada Mode London is The Audience, a site-specific installation by Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset, the masters of playful disorientation (yes, Prada Marfa – the faux pop up store in the Chihuahua Desert – was theirs). Here, Town Hall is transformed into a cinema – though nothing about it feels straightforward. On screen: a deliberately blurred, endlessly looping film, featuring a painter and a writer in conversation about their creative practice, trapped in an eternal domestic drama. In the auditorium: five eerily lifelike sculptures of cinemagoers, scattered across seats in various states of attention – absorbed, distracted, slouched, alert. Nearby, another work, The Conversation, positions a woman at a café table, FaceTiming with one of the film’s characters. Together, the pieces blur the line between watcher and watched, making the simple act of looking suddenly feel theatrical.
“The Audience is a work about spectatorship and redirecting the gaze of the visitors,” the duo explain. “Spaces where attention is pulled in conflicting directions… where the audience has to actively navigate seemingly familiar environments in new ways.” And Prada, ever the architect of cultural scenery, has wrapped this in a full programme: expect talks, screenings, performances and DJ sets to expand the installation’s themes of image overload, hyperconnectivity and attention deficit.
For the first two days (October 15 and 16), Prada Mode London plays members-only club – cocktails, panels, Prada-clad guests murmuring in the shadows – before opening to the public from October 17 to 19.
Town Hall, with its decade-long restoration by Purcell, is the perfect backdrop: 60,000 square feet of newly revived civic architecture, ready to host some of London’s most ambitious cultural gatherings. Prada Mode, meanwhile, has already swept across Miami, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo and more, featuring heavyweights from Damien Hirst to Theaster Gates. Elmgreen & Dragset – whose CV spans the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Serpentine, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Fondazione Prada and, notably, Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth – are simply the latest to join the Prada canon.
At Prada Mode London, the spectacle is both on screen and in the seats. The question isn’t just what you’re looking at – it’s who’s looking back.
Photography courtesy of Prada.
