Ottessa Moshfegh has written a book of short stories for Prada starring Carey Mulligan

This past September, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented an eclectic S/S 2025 womenswear collection which the co-creative directors deemed ‘a Prada for every individual’. As such, the show – which was designed to capture ‘the unpredictability of human nature’ – comprised 49 radically different looks, a bold assemblage of elements which spanned Prada eras and rejected tidy thematics. ‘We thought of each individual as a superhero – with their own power, their own story,’ said Simons a the time. ‘That reflects an idea of transformation – through your practice, your actions, or through the clothes you wear.’

Heralding the collection’s arrival in stores earlier this year, Prada revealed a Steven Meisel-shot campaign starring Carey Mulligan. In each of the images, the British actress is transformed according to the look she wears: ‘each guise is an entirely different individual, inventing a multitude of protagonists, different lives, each entirely separate, unpredictable, and unique,’ said the house at the time. Celebrating fashion as ‘a tool for change’, it was conceived as a companion to the David Sims-shot A/W 2021 campaign, ‘Feels Like Prada’, a diary-like stream of images exploring what it feels like to wear Prada (the S/S 2025 campaign is titled ‘Acts Like Prada’).

Announced today, Prada has revealed the latest layer to the S/S 2025 campaign, drafting the American author Ottessa Moshfegh to contribute ten short stories which each imagine the life behind one of Mulligan’s characters. Best known for her 2018 novel ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ – which Moshfegh is currently adapting for the screen with Yorgos Lanthimos – she has also written the award-winning novels ‘McGlue’, ‘Eileen’ and ‘Lapvona’, alongside a collection of short stories titled ‘Homesick for Another World’. The resulting work – which will be collated in a limited-edition book – is titled ‘Ten Protagonists’.

The idea, says Prada, is to flesh out the various protagonists through ‘stories of women, invented by a woman’. Giving each a name – among them ‘Patricia’, ‘Fanny’ and ‘Alina’ – their imagined lives include working as a programmer, photographer and corporate translator. In typical Moshfegh style, they combine humdrum realities with the underlying strangeness of being alive. ‘I felt like I'd been born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people,’ she said after the release of ‘Eileen’. ‘I think that was the driving curiosity for me, thinking about real and fictional characters who could respond to that problem.’

This is not Moshfegh’s first dalliance with fashion. Now based in Pasadena, California, she is an avid collector of vintage clothing (in her own novels, clothing is often used as a device) and has previously written a dreamlike diary which backdropped Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s A/W 2022 collection for Proenza Schouler. She also walked the runway for Maryam Nassir Zadeh at New York Fashion Week in 2022.

‘Ten Protagonists’ will be released in limited-edition numbers, celebrated at in-store events in Mila, Paris, Tokyo and London.

prada.com

Acts Like Prada: Carey Mulligan Stars in Prada’s SS25 Campaign - YouTube

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