While the ultimate objective is to contribute to Italy’s first-ever successful attempt on the (currently New Zealand-held) cup, Prada’s involvement in sailing has also indirectly helped steer it through the choppy waters of fashion. Back in 1997, as Prada prepared its first Luna Rossa challenge, it launched the Linea Rossa—the line in which it has outfitted its sailors ever since.
As Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group’s CMO and Head of CSR, said in an email: “Prada has combined the knowledge gained from developing technical sportswear for the Luna Rossa team with Prada’s aesthetics, resulting in the Linea Rossa collection.” He added: “The attitude to introduce technical fabrics and refinements typically belonging to sportswear into the everyday formal wardrobe embodies Prada’s unconventional spirit.”
Most especially in menswear, “technical” is often used as an adjective to indicate high-performance function—or at least the appearance of it—through technologically advanced fabrications. At Linea Rossa the garments, footwear, and eyewear are all rooted in that core performance sailing origin, which means the functionality and robustness of the products is more reliably high-spec, akin less to fashion pieces and more to items of industrial design.
That functionality hasn’t sunk Linea Rossa’s chances of the occasional appearance on Prada’s highest podium. In 1999, Linea Rossa featured on both men’s and women’s mainline runways (the menswear linked-hands section was especially memorable), and it made a return in 2000. The red line reappeared on both runways for a relaunch in 2018, just at the point when the house was setting sail from its longstanding home on Via Fogazzaro to its new berth at Fondazione Prada. The next time we saw Linea Rossa on the runway was during a stand-out section of its spring 2020 show in Shanghai. It most recently re-emerged during the doldrums of Covid, for spring summer 2021’s The Show That Never Happened.
According to Vogue’s skeleton crew of sailing watchers (just me, I think) this year’s Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli craft and crew seem strong contenders to emerge from the opening “challenger” stages as winners of the right to take on New Zealand for the America’s Cup. For fashion reasons as much as sailing ones let’s hope they do it—because such a famous victory would surely herald another Linea Rossa runway moment.
