Hosting Prada Mode. Some thoughts on dreams becoming true, why London matters, and what happens when taste becomes the rarest currency.
An introduction
by Emilie Edberg, Managing Partner
When we set out to create Bottaccio’s new venue, Town Hall, our ambition was simple yet bold: to build a venue capable of hosting the world’s most exceptional events. Looking back at this past week, I can confidently say that this vision has come to life.
Prada Mode, the celebrated temporary cultural experience created by the fashion house Prada, has landed in London after shows in Miami, Hong Kong, Paris, Shanghai, Moscow, Los Angeles, Dubai, Tokyo, Seoul, Abu Dhabi, Osaka. Twelve editions across three continents, each one a roving cultural salon where art, design, and conversation converge.
“The Audience,” an installation by Elmgreen & Dragset in Vision Hall
When the audience becomes the art
Walk into Vision Hall and you encounter “The Audience,” an installation by Elmgreen & Dragset that transforms the room into a cinema. Chartreuse velvet seats fill the space. A film loops on screen, deliberately blurred, showing a painter and writer discussing their creative practice in fragments that resist easy comprehension. Among the seats sit five hyperrealistic sculptures of spectators.
Some lean forward, absorbed. Others slouch, distracted. One woman eats popcorn. Their silicone faces catch the screen’s glow. It takes a moment to distinguish which figures are sculptures and which are real visitors.
A blurred film loops on screen, collapsing the boundary between spectator and spectacle
The genius is in what this reveals. By collapsing the boundary between observer and observed, Elmgreen & Dragset turn the act of watching into the exhibition itself. You came to look at art. Instead, you have become it.
In an age where we are simultaneously spectators and content, consumers and consumed, this confrontation feels urgent. We are always watching, always being watched, always performing. The cinema, that great democratic space of the 20th century where audiences gathered in shared focus, now becomes a question: what does it mean to pay attention when attention itself has become the scarcest resource?
The installation resonates with the building it occupies. Town Hall was designed as a platform for civic participation, a stage where audiences gathered not passively but as active contributors to democracy. For decades, this was a space where culture was co-created, not consumed. That Elmgreen & Dragset have staged this meditation on spectatorship here, in a building literally built for collective engagement, is no accident.
What Prada understands
Here is what sets Prada apart. They understand that taste cannot be manufactured or purchased. It can only be cultivated through sustained, deep engagement with culture.
Since 2018, Prada Mode has operated as something unprecedented: a traveling cultural institution that contributes genuinely to contemporary discourse while bearing a luxury brand’s name. When Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen interrogated facial recognition technology at Maxim’s in Paris, or when director Jia Zhang-Ke created a cinematic exploration of Chinese culture broadcast live during pandemic lockdowns in Shanghai, or when Kazuyo Sejima opened Tokyo’s Teien Museum grounds to the public for the first time in its history, these were not marketing exercises. They were cultural interventions that happened to involve Prada.
The return to London demonstrates maturity in the format. This edition runs five days, the longest yet, with three days open to the public. What began as an exclusive 48-hour salon has evolved into a semi-public cultural forum. Talks, workshops, film screenings, and performances animate the space throughout. The shift from serving clients to serving culture is deliberate.
Inner Space transformed into a forum for talks, workshops and freeform dialogue
This matters because the traditional luxury model has fundamentally changed. High-net-worth individuals no longer seek mere objects. They seek distinction, and distinction now comes from what you have experienced, what you understand, what conversations you can meaningfully contribute to. Prada Mode cultivates exactly the kind of cultural literacy that defines contemporary taste.
But there is something deeper at work. In choosing King’s Cross, in occupying a civic building with civic history, in staging an artwork about collective attention at a moment when attention has become infinitely fragmented, Prada Mode asks us to remember what we risk losing. The cinema as shared space. The gathering as meaningful act. The irreplaceable experience of being present, together, focused on something beyond ourselves.
Presence as discipline
Taste, ultimately, is a discipline. It is acquired not through consumption, but through immersion, through the patient practice of embedding yourself in the footprint of culture, both experiencing it and contributing to it.
When Elmgreen & Dragset blur the film to force focus on the act of watching rather than what is watched, they make an argument about value. Your presence matters. Your attention is the medium. The audience completes the work. This is what Prada Mode offers in its coming to London: a reminder that in a world of infinite content and diminishing focus, the rarest luxury is sustained attention. The most valuable currency is taste earned through the deliberate practice of showing up, paying attention, and contributing to the making of meaning itself.
That this happens in our venue, a restored civic space, at the epicenter of technological transformation, makes the statement complete. London has always been a city where culture is forged in the friction between old and new.
For Prada Mode to choose our venue, for two of the world’s most important artists to stage such a timely, introspective piece on our stage, brings everything full circle for me. It echoes that original dream I had when we began this beautiful adventure with Town Hall, and I cannot help but feel immensely proud.
