Prada Marfa celebrates 15 years of excessive style within the West Texas desert

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There is a certain subgroup of people who, when I tell them I live in Marfa, get a blurry look in their eyes. “Marfa,” they mused. “That’s the tiny town in the middle of the desert with a Prada shop, isn’t it?” Yes and no.

If you drive on Texas Highway 90 from El Paso to Marfa, in the middle of a barren stretch of bush grass and mesquite bushes, you actually come across an incongruous building that at first glance looks like a Prada store in the middle of the desert. However, if you drive by to take a closer look, the “store” will turn out to be something more confusing. Inside, the stilettos and handbags on display are genuine Prada designs, but they seem oddly dated. The door is permanently locked and the building is always uninhabited.

Prada Marfa is not in Marfa, but a 40-minute drive west outside of Valentine. It’s also not a shop, but a freestanding sculpture in the shape of a shop designed by Scandinavian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset and commissioned by Ballroom Marfa and Art Production Fund. Prada Marfa was built 15 years ago and borrows elements from Pop Art, Minimalism and Land Art. The creators, who are now based in Berlin, liked the idea of ​​putting luxury goods – donated by designer Miuccia Prada from the 2005 collection – in a context in which they would appear displaced and strange. The original plan was not to maintain the adobe building in order to settle back into the earth calmly and organically. Until then, it was cared for by Valentine artist and local celebrity Boyd Elder.

“Before social media, it was a long time on its own,” Elmgreen said in an interview with Ballroom Marfa on the piece’s 15th anniversary. “People didn’t go to Valentine to see a Prada store that was closed forever.” That changed with the advent of Instagram and the advent of Marfa as a fashionable travel destination. At the beginning of Prada Marfa’s life, around 5,000 art tourists visited Marfa each year. last year there were around 40,000. Instead of falling in the dust again, Prada Marfa became a destination in its own right. Beyoncé posed in front of it, and so did the Simpsons.

Prada Marfa should stick out like a sore thumb, but it seems less out of place as Marfa has become a high-end brand name itself. In 2014, the Texan Ministry of Transportation classified Prada Marfa as a museum. The artists behind the piece are confident of its unexpected new life as a coveted selfie backdrop. “It’s like a teenager moving out,” Dragset told Ballroom Marfa. “You’re kind of losing control of it.”

Despite its ubiquity on social media, the sculpture retains an eerie appeal. My favorite time is late at night, when the building is lit as brightly as an exhibition space on a busy city street. Its glow is often the brightest for miles and attracts some fantastic looking insects that flap their wings against the glass and try to enter but are locked out forever.

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