Prada's long red thread: Twenty years of sneaker culture told in a single release

The first America's Cup faced by Team Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli on board the homonymous boat in 2000 is legendary not only for its impact on Italian pop culture but also for the enormous influence it had in establishing one of the dominant trends in the fashion of the new millennium: that of luxury sneakers. But the past always ends up coming back and so, between December and early 2021, the myth of the Luna Rossa will continue with the Prada Christmas Race that will be held from 17 to 20 December at Waitemata Harbour in the Gulf of Hauraki in New Zealand. To accentuate the impression of time warp surrounding the upcoming regatta is not only the almost perfect time coincidence of twenty years or so from the first competition but also the details more related to fashion than sailing such as the new official sneakers of Team Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, the A+P LUNA ROSSA 21, made together with adidas and direct descendants of the Prada America's Cup – which remain to date one of the most iconic fashion items in the history of fashion.

The new A+P LUNA ROSSA 21 therefore follows the general aspect of the original Prada America's Cup but also represents an overcoming of it, not to say the symbol of an entirely different era but still memories of its origins. The original Prada America's Cup, known at the time of its release as its code PS0906, and part of the technical collection released in 1997, represented both a black swan event in the field of fashion design and a cultural event for the public for which the new sneaker represented a transversal phenomenon that transformed sneakers into one of the first status symbols of the hip-hop world and the new generations of young people and involved both the usual consumers of luxury and the street world - and all years before fashion and streetwear took their first steps towards each other, then arriving at the current state of the industry.

The technical update of the new silhouette is in fact the mirror of the technical update of the new AC75 Luna Rossa full-foiling monohull, launched in Cagliari in October 2019 and finally ready to make its debut on the waters of Auckland. As they said, times have changed: where the first Prada America's Cup represented the first step of an innovative fashion that wanted to make its entrance into the new millennium on the right foot; the A+P LUNA ROSSA 21 is the result of a different world and fashion, first of all as a historical collaboration between two brands with legendary fame, and then also as a reflection of that techwear world that has gone far beyond the mesh and vulcanized outs of the original sneaker to welcome in itself a series of innovations and technologies markedly modern that have become , in itself, the new synonym of luxury: no longer a materially precious product, but a culturally and technologically advanced product with a rich history sedimented for years.

A new look for a spirit that, over the years, has not changed, the completion of a cycle that speaks of a fashion with an increasingly transversal work: it would have been inconceivable in fact if Prada had collaborated with adidas twenty years ago, when still the luxury industry rested on old schemes that would soon collapse. The new dialogue of luxury and technique, the new dimension of the sneaker market and the propagation of a myth like that of Luna Rossa, which has had many secondary repercussions for two decades of fashion and who knows how many more decades to come, make the release of the A+P LUNA ROSSA 21 a perfect closure not so much of 2020 but of the first twenty years of fashion all in its facets and facets of the new millennium.

The A+P LUNA ROSSA21 by Prada and adidas will be available from December 9th online on both the Prada and adidas websites, in the flagships of both brands and at selected retailers.