Prada will dress NASA’s astronauts — and it is not a publicity stunt
A close-fitting suit with ventilation tubing knitted straight into the fabric was shown at Prada’s Manhattan store. It will be worn under the spacesuit by those flying to the Moon.
Prada has shown the inner layer of clothing that will be worn by NASA astronauts flying to the Moon. The Italian house becomes the first major luxury player to enter the space industry in earnest.
The garment was made with the Houston company Axiom Space, which works in space infrastructure. It fits the body closely, and the ventilation tubing is knitted straight into the fabric. Its official name is the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment.
“We really do have a broad range of competencies and know-how,” Prada’s marketing director Lorenzo Bertelli said at a presentation in the house’s Manhattan store, seated beside a mannequin in the new suit. The Axiom Space chief executive Jonathan Sirtain added that the expertise for developing products for space exploration “can come from a great many industries that at first glance are entirely unconnected”.
This continues a story that began in 2024, when Prada presented a spacesuit intended for use on NASA’s Artemis 4 mission — the Moon landing expected in 2028.
Luxury brands have always drawn inspiration from space. But Prada, in the words of Thomai Serdari, a luxury brand strategist and professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, “has gone beyond inspiration into a real partnership”. There are two motives, in her view: access to a wealthy audience already thinking about space travel, and positioning the brand as avant-garde. Companies from Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin to Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long been building space tourism for the rich.
The resumption of lunar flights “will inevitably draw a great many eyes”, notes Luca Solca, head of global luxury goods at Bernstein: brands need to stay visible and relevant.
The backdrop is not an easy one: after two years of decline the industry had only just begun to stabilise, but the war with Iran that started at the end of February undermined tourist flows and hit spending far beyond the Middle East.
It is not only luxury labels heading into space: Under Armour is working with Virgin Galactic on space clothing, and Columbia Sportswear with Intuitive Machines on fabrics. Whether other luxury players will follow is an open question. “In luxury it matters to be first, to set the trend,” says Serdari, noting that Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Chanel are also interested in space travel but will most likely find their own ways in. “You will never see the top of luxury copying one another.”