Prada will dress NASA’s astronauts — and it is not a publicity stunt

Prada has unveiled the inner-layer garment that NASA astronauts heading to the moon will wear. The Italian house becomes the first major luxury player to make real inroads into the space industry.

The suit was created with Houston-based space infrastructure developer Axiom Space. It hugs the body, with ventilation tubes knitted into the garment itself. Its official name is the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment.

“We have really a broad spectrum of capability and know-how,” said Prada chief marketing officer Lorenzo Bertelli at an event in the house’s Manhattan store, sitting beside a mannequin wearing the new garment. Axiom Space CEO Jonathan Cirtain added that expertise for developing space exploration products “can come from lots of seemingly unrelated industries.”

It follows Prada’s 2024 move into space fashion, when it unveiled a spacesuit expected to be used for NASA’s Artemis 4 moon landing, anticipated in 2028.

Luxury brands have long drawn inspiration from space travel. But Prada has gone “beyond inspiration into an actual partnership,” says Thomai Serdari, a luxury brand strategist and marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. She points to two motives: access to affluent consumers already contemplating space travel, and aligning the brand with avant-garde thought. Companies from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to Elon Musk’s SpaceX have leaned into space tourism for the wealthy.

The resumption of human travel to the moon is “bound to attract a lot of eyeballs,” notes Luca Solca, global head of luxury goods at Bernstein: brands need to stay relevant and visible.

The backdrop is not easy: after two years of contraction the industry was showing signs of stabilisation until the Iran war began at the end of February, disrupting travel and denting spending far beyond the Middle East.

It is not only luxury heading to space: Under Armour has partnered with Virgin Galactic on space apparel, and Columbia Sportswear has worked with Intuitive Machines on space fabric technology. Whether other luxury players follow Prada remains unclear. “In luxury, it is important to be the first to do something, to be a trend-setter,” Serdari says, noting that Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Chanel are all interested in space travel but would likely find their own ways in. “You will never see the upper crust of the luxury sector copying each other.”