PRADA RE-NYLON COLLECTION 2024 CAMPAIGN

Responsibility is action: the circularity and sustainability at the heart of Prada’s ground-breaking Re-Nylon Collection forms the touchstone of its 2024 advertising campaign, featuring celebrated actors and activists Emma Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch photographed by Willy Vanderperre. A campaign that sees beyond, portraying the Prada Group’s ongoing partnership with UNESCO for ocean preservation. Launched in 2019, Prada Re-Nylon – comprising accessories and ready-to-wear for men and women – epitomises a fundamental duality of Prada’s identity; innovation in spirit, responsibility in action. Placing sustainability at the heart of a fashion collection, Prada Re-Nylon has instigated a shift across the brand as a whole. Today, production of all Prada virgin nylon has been converted to regenerated nylon, a radical commitment to sustainability by a major luxury house.

Nylon is an emblem of the radicalism at the very heart of Prada’s design ethos. The brand’s signature material since the end of the Seventies, Miuccia Prada’s introduction of nylon through Prada’s accessories represented a re-set of contemporary notions of luxury – a pragmatic material reconsidered, used in a new context, elevated through design. Prada’s reinvention has cemented nylon as part of the modern cannon of luxury. Over four decades, Prada has continued to challenge convention in its use of nylon across accessories and ready-to-wear, a material connection to the thought-processes always at the heart of its DNA.

In the twenty-first century, notions of luxury have again shifted, embracing ideologies and environmental concerns – thinking luxury. Prada Re-Nylon is an evolution of this iconic fabric to ECONYL®, a regenerated nylon yarn that can be ceaselessly recycled to produce material of the same high quality. Prada Re-Nylon is regenerated nylon created through the recycling and purification of plastic collected from the ocean – like fishing nets – and from the landfills, as well as textile fiber waste from all over the world. Through a complex process of depolymerization and re-polymerisation, Prada Re-Nylon yarn is produced through a circular approach.

This journey, in turn, inspires the 2024 Prada Re-Nylon Collection campaign which presents an offering of timeless and eternal pieces, worn by Watson and Cumberbatch. This new collection is literally framed by the environment it is actively preserving: the ocean.

As of July 2023, 1% of the proceeds from the Prada Re-Nylon Collection supports SEA BEYOND, the educational program launched in 2019 by Prada Group and UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC). A project in line with the Group’s passionate societal concerns and the value it has always afforded to education and culture, SEA BEYOND has raised global awareness on sustainability and ocean literacy principles, educating young generations around the world. To protect our ocean, we need to understand it – learn, think, act.

Credits

Photographer: Willy Vanderperre

BIOGRAPHIES

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Benedict Cumberbatch is a BAFTA, Emmy and a Laurence Olivier Award-winning and Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-nominated actor. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his role in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021), following his first nomination for his portrayal of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (2014). Cumberbatch recently starred in Wes Anderson’s acclaimed short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (2023) for Netflix and reprised his role as ‘Doctor Strange’ in Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022). He will next be seen starring in Netflix’s Eric, a thriller miniseries from creator Abi Morgan. Cumberbatch gained wide recognition for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the series Sherlock (2010-2017). In 2014, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2015, he was appointed a CBE at Buckingham Palace for services to the performing arts and to charity.

EMMA WATSON

Emma Watson is a British actor and activist, known for roles in both blockbusters and independent movies across three decades. She rose to prominence as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter franchise, acting across all eight films from 2001 to 2011, later working with directors including Darren Aronofsky, Sofia Coppola and Greta Gerwig. In 2014, Watson was honoured by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, winning British Artist of the Year. In July 2014, Watson was appointed a UN Women Goodwill ambassador, a reflection of her advocacy for gender equality and women’s rights. She is a founding member of Time's Up UK and in July 2019 helped launch a legal helpline for people who have suffered sexual harassment in the workplace. Watson is also a passionate activist for environmental justice and climate change mitigation, and hosted a panel at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.