MILAN — The Prada family’s penchant for sophisticated design, avant-garde art and fine decor is as mythological as its fashion ventures, having sparked articles, trickled down into books and triggered curiosity.
Ahead of the upcoming Milan Design Week, the namesake fashion brand is unveiling a design-led project centered on the Japanese art of ceramics conceived and curated by Theaster Gates — the multidisciplinary Black artist and longtime Prada collaborator.
Titled “Chawan Cabinet,” the exhibition is to be unveiled Friday inside a newly unveiled retail space on Milan’s Via Montenapoleone, in the same building housing the fashion brand’s menswear store on the luxury shopping street.
The show unfurls within a domestic Japanese environment where the objects — sitting at the intersection of design and art — are displayed. These include ceramics and vases crafted by Gates’ own studio as well as by some of his Japanese craftspeople friends including Taira Kuroki from Kyoto, Yuichi Hirano and Koichi Ohara from Tokoname, and Shion Tabata from Karuizawa.
Drawing from Japan’s legacy in pottery-making, the objects comprise the chawan tea bowls integral to the country’s tea culture, the yumoni everyday teacups, the guinomi sake cups and the tokkuri sake bottles, in addition to Gates’ vases. They are juxtaposed to design objects from Prada’s homeware line, which the brand has consistently offered over the past few years as part of its lifestyle push.
Part of the Prada Home “Chawan Cabinet” exhibition.
Courtesy of Prada
“Prada has allowed me to fully push my interest in domestic objects, retail strategies, branding campaigns and the ongoing creation of space to build what feels like the beginning of something very special. It’s shifting my center,” Gates told WWD.
“This project has the ability to totally transform where the center of my artistic practice lives. In a moment when my investment in the conceptual has to meet the truth of the complexities of the streets, I come back to the hand, the table, friendship and simple human kindness. Pots are about people. I want to focus on that,” the artist offered.
Prada said that the project falls within its “long-standing dialogue between intellectual inquiry and material innovation [which] finds [in the exhibit] a new extension into the domestic sphere as a framework for spaces and forms of exchange. The collaboration bridges distinct yet resonant worlds: Italian design, Japanese craft traditions, and Gates’ artistic and social practice.”
The latter is rooted in conceptual formalism, sculpture, space theory, land art and performance.
The main exhibition space is decked in ceramic floor tiles developed by Gates in collaboration with Mizuno Seitoen Lab, a Tokoname, Japan-based ceramics manufacturing company, while earthy plaster covers the walls.
A long table in upcycled wood stands empty at the center of the opening room, flanked on the left by a modular metal shelving system displaying some of the project’s Japanese ceramics piled up almost haphazardly. They are spaced out by a green niche showcasing Prada Home pieces also made in Japan.
The opposite wall of the rooms is home to related installations, including a cabinet from Gates’ personal collection — its shelves lined in chawan bowls from Gates 1,000 tea bowl project, completed in 2023 and never showcased before.
Throughout the exhibit vintage turntables will be playing scores selected by Gates as the soundscape for the immersive experience.
The exhibition extends outside, in the inner courtyard of the stately palazzo, where a tea house is installed according to the principles of traditional Japanese architecture, including the presence of a tatami module and plaster walls. Greenery and Gates’ sculptural vases and pottery complete the outdoor portion of the exhibit. Prada is staging tea ceremonies led by Japanese tea masters on an invite-only basis.
Part of the Prada Home “Chawan Cabinet” exhibition.
Courtesy of Prada
Gates has previously collaborated with the Prada brand for several Prada Mode iterations in Miami, London and Abu Dhabi between 2018 and 2025.
The artist is not new to the Prada universe altogether, having served as the co-chair of Prada Group’s Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council since 2019. The latter has since evolved into the luxury company’s Global People Culture Forums, of which Gates continues to be a member.
In 2023, the artist’s Dorchester Industries, the design and manufacturing arm of his studio, launched the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, in partnership with Rebuild Foundation and Prada Group. The three-year program has served as a platform for Black or brown artists, investing in their development and exposing them to organizations interested in working with diverse talent, such as Prada.
He has also teamed with the Fondazione Prada art institution on several occasions, most recently curating the “China Cabinet” show in 2021 at Prada’s Rong Zhai mansion in Shanghai.
The “Chawan Cabinet” exhibit in Milan opens on the eve of the city’s design week and leading furniture fair Salone del Mobile, marking Prada’s second project timed with the buzzy week.
As reported, the brand is also hosting the 2026 edition of Prada Frames — the symposium exploring the complex relationship between design and the natural environment and society. Scheduled for Sunday to Tuesday, it focuses on the apparently out-of-design, but fashion-tied and intangible topic of image-making. Titled “In Sight,” the three-day event was again conceived by Milan- and Rotterdam, Netherlands-based design studio Formafantasma and was backed by Prada.
