text by Andrea Riano

At a time when fashion’s cultural events are so often reduced to surface-level branding, Prada Mode’s second edition in Japan is a serious meditation on how architecture can reimagine the ecosystem of an island. In the heart of Osaka, the brand collaborates with architect Kazuyo Sejima, inviting guests to participate in a critical dialogue, exclusive performances, and an immersive exhibition.

Open to the public through June 15th, Prada Mode Osaka takes place in Umekita Park, a rare oasis nestled between Osaka’s glass towers and directly connected to the country’s busiest train station. This is the twelfth edition of the brand’s cultural journey, which has landed everywhere from Miami to Hong Kong and now, for the second time, in Japan. This particular edition is curated by Pritzker Prize-winning architect and head of SANAA, Kazuyo Sejima, a frequent collaborator of Prada.

In 2008, the Fukutake Foundation, which manages the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, invited Sejima to reimagine and shape the built environment of the small Seto island of Inujima. At Prada Mode, the architect shares this ongoing work through models, videos, and other materials at a SANAA-designed pavilion in the park. In the days leading up to Prada Mode Osaka, Inujima Project offered a private preview of Inujima, introducing the history of the island, Sejima’s projects there over the past 17 years, and her vision for its future. During the Inujima Project, Prada and the architect unveiled a permanent pavilion at Inujima Life Garden, designed by Sejima and donated to the island by Prada.

“On Inujima, a tiny island rich in nature, visitors will encounter and experience symbiosis - a landscape that combines history, architecture, art, and daily life. In Osaka, a city with historical ties to Inujima, this experience will be shared and expanded to reach a wider audience. At this edition of Prada Mode, Symbiosis will take shape through conversations and discoveries, creating a new landscape that continues to grow with the participation of all,” says Kazuyo Sejima.

Kazuyo Sejima at Prada Mode, Osaka
Courtesy of Prada

The programming reflects that same ethos. The week-long schedule is a soft collision of art, intellect, and experimental sound curated by Craig Richards, featuring performances by Nik Bärtsch, Reggie Watts, and C.A.R. (Choosing Acronyms Randomly), the latter being an incredible post-punk performance. Guests lounged on floor cushions, sipped Prada-branded negronis and olives, while watching film screenings by Bêka & Lemoine and a dance piece by choreographer Wayne McGregor, joined by composer Keiichiro Shibuya. Shibuya also presented “ANDROID MARIA,” a newly created android developed with a team of leading developers, produced and presented by ATAK.

“It’s not about promotion here. It’s about architecture, music, ideas. The curation is unique. Prada genuinely wants to support culture.” says Shibuya, who is known for challenging the boundaries between humans and technology through his compositions and collaborations with artists and scientists, such as his Android Orchestra.

Indeed, Prada Mode has never really been about fashion, instead, it's about the contexts that shape it: cities, people, materials, and memory. In Osaka, that vision reaches a new level of clarity.

Prada Mode is on view through June 15th at Umekita Park, Ofukacho, Kita Ward, Osaka, 530-0011

text by Lara Monro

This April, choreographer and director Holly Blakey returns to London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall with the UK premiere of A Wound With Teeth and Phantom—a poetic double bill that moves through the fragile space between remembering and forgetting, intimacy and distance, body and absence. Following their world premiere in Paris, these works arrive charged with raw intensity and emotional precision, further cementing Blakey’s status as one of the most vital voices in contemporary movement.

Blakey’s work resists easy categorization—existing in the liminal space between film and stage, commercial and avant-garde, sensual and sacred. Known for her signature blend of tactile immediacy and cinematic movement, she has choreographed for Florence and the Machine, Rosalía, and Harry Styles while creating radical live performance works at institutions like the Southbank Centre. Her choreography is a language of desire, distortion, and dissolution.

A recipient of a UK MVA Award for Best Choreography (Florence and the Machine’s Delilah) and a nominee for Best New Director, Blakey has collaborated with Gucci, Burberry, and Dior while cultivating a singular performance vocabulary. Her return to Queen Elizabeth Hall follows the five-year evolution of Cowpuncher and its sequels—culminating in a sold-out Royal Festival Hall performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra.

A Wound With Teeth

How do we reconstruct ourselves in the absence of memory? In A Wound With Teeth, Blakey unflinchingly explores forgetting—not as loss, but as a space for reinvention. Dancers navigate a world on the brink of collapse, summoning monsters, myths, and fragmented selves in place of what has been erased. Inspired by Blakey’s own experience with memory loss, the piece unfolds like a fever dream—part elegy, part invocation—hovering between the rational and the uncanny.

Phantom

If A Wound With Teeth is an act of forgetting, Phantom is a ritual of remembrance. Ten dancers move with aching precision through a liminal space of grief and endurance, their bodies caught in a choreography that feels like sacred rite. Set to an atmospheric score by Gwilym Gold and costumed by Chopova Lowena, Phantom transforms the pain of Blakey’s personal experience with miscarriage into a visceral, collective reckoning. It is not about healing, but confrontation—a raw engagement with the weight of what we carry and the echoes we cannot silence.

This double bill marks a deepening of Blakey’s artistic vision—starker, more intimate, and defiantly vulnerable. Both works exist in the space beyond language, where memory is fluid and the body archives feeling.

Part performance, part séance, A Wound With Teeth and Phantom offer no easy catharsis. Instead, they leave us suspended—in awe, in discomfort, in recognition. A necessary, unflinching experience from one of choreography’s most transgressive and transcendent voices.

text by Andrea Riano

text by Lara Monro

A Wound With Teeth

Phantom

ART / FASHION/ CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM

Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE