A Video Game Designer and a Filmmaker Created a Prada Dreamscape

The sidewalk outside The Hotel Chelsea is packed with people on the perfect spring morning of Wednesday, June 3. Producers clad in all black, PR people with perfectly straightened hair, and a number of besuited men and women speaking fluent Italian milled about, all sporting Prada lanyards. 

“Oooh, is there a celebrity in there?” one passerby jokes as she attempts to forge a path through the scrum.

She’s close; in fact there are several celebrities “in there,” all gathered for the fourteenth iteration of Prada Mode, the cultural event series put on by the luxury house, which will be open to the public through Sunday, June 7. Last year’s event took place on several so-called Japanese art islands of the Seto Inland Sea and featured visits to the storied Chichu Museum, a pizza-making workshop with a famous Tokyo chef, and an unveiling of two sculptures donated by the legendary Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima. This year’s version is entirely New York, with a home base at the hotel and various satellite locations across the city, including Katz’s Delicatessen and the Angelika Film Center.

Satellites are, in fact, the whole point, not to mention the name of the art exhibition created by filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and video game creator Hideo Kojima that has taken over The Hotel Chelsea for the week: Satellites II. After a few minutes of observing the crowd outside — which included several hotel employees clad in silver lamé shirt-and-pants sets, silvery knee socks, and low-profile Prada sneakers, as well as one woman decked out in rhinestone-embellished Prada kitten heels and a matching bag — we’re ushered into the cavernous lobby to see what Winding Refn and Kojima have dreamed up. 

It turns out everything is silver: the event programs, the Jetsons-looking television sets dominating the room off the lobby bar, and the entire Bard Room. The latter has been lined in slinky silver drapes that catch the light and accessorized with reflective tables, chairs, and stools. Silver “is the color of optimism,” Winding Refn, who grew up in the city in the 1980s, explains during the press-preview panel. A color that, to him and to Kojima, both parents, means that the future will be bright for generations to come. 

It’s a pleasant lens on things, and one that comes through in Winding Refn and Kojima’s conversation on stage. They’re kind of like overgrown teenagers the way they enthuse over their friendship, explaining that, because Winding Refn speaks only Dutch and English, and Kojima speaks only Japanese (he is accompanied by an interpreter), they have never actually had a dialogue in words. For the past 16 years of their friendship — which started when Kojima cold emailed Winding Refn about being a fan of his movies — they have mostly spoken through pictures and video clips and pieces of music. Winding Refn will send Kojima a photo of himself in a suit, for instance, and Kojima will reply with a selfie in pajamas. Or one will send a song, and the other will reply with a video clip that they believe corresponds to it — a natural next step in the conversation. Winding Refn calls Kojima his “best friend.” 

“We very much feel that we are twins,” he adds. 

What this looks like in physical form is apparently a series of elements: the aforementioned television screens are arranged around the hotel’s first floor in pairs, with one showing Winding Refn’s face and the other showing Kojima’s. They’re each speaking aloud in their own language, performing a sort of orbit for public consumption. 

Upstairs, in designated hotel rooms, are a pair of dreamscapes. One room is color drenched in reflective silver fabric, from the walls to the bed to the chairs. The other bedspread is white with a cloud motif projected onto it like the backdrop to one of Kojima’s games. Two chairs in Prada red sit in front. 

Topping off the exhibit is a live “pirate” broadcast channel conceived of by the two friends, with different programming on air every hour of the day on Wednesday and Thursday. There’s a “story time” with Maya Hawke, a “talk show” with poet Amanda Gorman, and several conversations between Kojima and Winding Refn. It was important for Kojima to include many modes of expression in the exhibit, he says, because, while he was growing up in Tokyo, information was “smeared in” to him in a similar way. Most of it came in English, but “it wasn’t about the language,” he says. “It was about the visuals, the music, the sounds.” Things that could transcend a language barrier. 

The Prada of it all is a little more mysterious. If not for the branding, one could be forgiven for thinking they’d just stumbled into the mind palace of two creative besties. Winding Refn’s relationship with the brand goes back even longer than his friendship with Kojima, to when he met Mrs. Prada at the Met Gala. “I like silence,” Winding Refn says of their initial interactions. “So when you can sit with someone in silence and feel comfortable, it’s a very good start of a collaboration.” He was attracted, too, to the “elegance” of the Prada brand — the intentional thought and philosophy behind it, and the sense of ever-evolving curiosity. 

Prada puts forward the “thought-provoking idea that clothes are as important as your experience or your thoughts,” Winding Refin adds. “They’re not just something to wear. They’re a state of mind. They’re a symbol of an opinion.” 

So in a way, it all hangs together. And in a way, the mystery is the point. “We believe the world is more beautiful when it’s a little bit chaotic,” Winding Refn says. 

As I pass through the small maze of rooms again, I walk by the actress Sophie Thatcher, who is also an avid gamer, raving about the setting. “My room is insane,” she effuses. She is wearing a pink ruffled Prada dress and white pumps. On Thursday night, she’ll give her first-ever musical performance to the rest of the Prada Mode guests.  

Then I’m spit back out into the streets of the best city in the world, the silver of Kojima and Winding Refn’s idealism fading to grey behind me. 

来源：Highsnobiety — 原文链接