Prada Brought Nylon to the Runway. Now, the Label Takes It to the Wilderness
For Prada, nylon is more than just a material, it is emblematic of disruption and revolution. Before Miuccia Prada worked up backpacks in the material, nylon was considered anathema to luxury. The company invested a considerable sum to develop the techniques required to turn nylon into luxury bags and, eventually, other pieces. And, when presented on the runway, it seemed daring — one of fashion’s eminent houses turning an overlooked material into something people wanted.
Then, in 2019, Prada once again turned to nylon in a bid to disrupt, launching Re-Nylon, an important foray into sustainable production, that saw nylon fashioned from landfill waste and ocean-sourced plastics. By no means the first sustainability project to leverage ocean plastics and landfill waste, Re-Nylon became important because of who was behind it. Before its introduction, much of the discourse surrounding sustainability tended to focus on outdoors brands and often the idea of going green was seen as involving an aesthetic trade off. With Re-Nylon, Prada signalled an important shift: sustainability could be cool, too.
As Prada rolls out its 2025 Re-Nylon collection, the Milanese house is making sustainability more appealing than ever, with a campaign and docu-series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Sadie Sink, alongside SEA BEYOND ambassadors Valentina Gottlieb and Giovanni Chimienti. SEA BEYOND was introduced alongside Re-Nylon in 2019 with an aim of educating customers about ocean conservation and the importance of reducing ocean pollution.
If Prada’s initial embrace of nylon was noteworthy because the brand was elevating a humble material onto the runway, the 2025 campaign is noteworthy because it showcases Re-Nylon’s more rugged, utilitarian and outdoorsy ideological roots, trading the runway for the great outdoors. The documentaries were produced with National Geographic CreativeWorks (an ongoing partner for Re-Nylon campaigns) and see Cumberbatch, Sink, Gottlieb, and Chimienti visit Norway and Mexico, examining the importance of ocean conservation, the intricate savoir-faire required to bring Re-Nylon to life and the philosophical underpinnings of the project.
The accompanying campaign imagery showcases some of the 191 pieces from the 2025 collection, in rugged settings that arguably stand the most to gain from a concerted effort to change the way we make — and consume clothes. Among the assortment are myriad bags (which made Prada’s use of nylon famous), jackets, accessories and even soft tailoring. Predominantly done up in black — which is something of Prada’s nylon tradition — the collection is interspersed with pops of blue and green, nods to the sea and sky and the bottles that have been fished from the former to help make these garments.
The timing of the collection’s launch is fitting — it was recently confirmed that 2024 was the very first calendar year where the average temperature was 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, people do not seem willing to change their habits. This is something Prada has understood better than anybody else: the way to convince people to change their habits is not to reason with them using logic and convince them to buy something different, it’s to change the way things are made without changing the way they look. Prada made nylon famous and using nylon helped enshrine Miuccia Prada — and her family’s label — as the thinking person’s luxury brand. Prada made people yearn for nylon and so, when they realized that people should yearn for sustainability, they decided to make nylon sustainable. Sink and Cumberbatch, photographed and filmed in Mexico and Norway, make sustainability aspirational. There’s a story to be told about oceans that are to be saved and Prada, alongside National Geographic CreativeWorks, is telling it.
It is up to us to listen and to change the way we shop.
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