Chaos rules the universe. Nothing is certain. Nothing is permanent. Cultures, nations, and even planets disappear. Throughout time, humans seeking meaning and purpose have turned to the rubble of past civilizations to learn their customs and values. Perhaps eons from now, future humans—or, more likely, astute intergalactic visitors—will uncover what remains of us.

Said extraterrestrials might dig into the remnants of Pradasphere II, the Italian brand Prada’s recent exhibition in Shanghai. “It’s a psychological portrait,” said Michael Rock, the founding partner and executive creative director of design firm 2×4, who has worked with Prada on myriad creative pursuits over the last 25 years. As a consultant and collaborator on this project, he aimed to tell a far-reaching story, one that encapsulated Prada’s 111-year history and Miuccia Prada’s 40-year journey designing for her family’s brand. “I’ve learned to trust her natural ability to put two totally unrelated things together and make something great,” said Rock. To work with her, he said, one must “follow her lead and let her disruptive way of thinking drive things forward. You learn so much from not resisting that and seeing where it takes you.”

Curated by Mrs. Prada and her co-creative director since 2020, Raf Simons, the show featured around 400 Prada “artifacts,” as Rock put it. “Artifact” connotes something of historical interest, something that speaks to the way humans lived at a certain point in time. Something that alien archeologists (or the evolved versions of humans that survive the impending apocalypse) would appreciate. Rock suggests future students of our society would do well to start with shoes: “A shoe is a shoe and it’s got to fit a foot, and you’ve got to be able to walk in it,” he says. “Therefore, assuming that, whenever this hypothetical future is, we still have feet, you’d understand immediately the need that it was trying to fulfill. So then everything else becomes a story about the embellishment.”

To reconstruct the post-planetary Pradasphere, Document challenged artist Romain Lenancker to visualize a selection of objects featured in the Shanghai exhibition. Perhaps thousands of years from now, terrestrial academics—should they exist—will unearth this study and understand the 21st century through these enduring Prada artifacts.

OBJECT: PRADA SPRING/SUMMER 2024 POLO SHIRT
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3027 ON TAU CETI E*, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: CASHMERE ENCAPSULATED IN IRON

This knit button-up polo shirt, shown on the runway in September 2023 with an oversized work jacket and red fringe skirt, creates a “paradox or tension between the pretty and the unnerving that I think is in [Miuccia Prada’s] work all the time,” said Michael Rock.

OBJECT: PRADA 1991 BAG
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3029 ON KEPLER-62 F, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: SATIN WITH TRACES OF COBALT AND RHODIUM

This handbag, said Rock, adheres to the Shklovskian idea of defamiliarization. “The form is quite familiar. It’s not exotic. But a switch in color or material forces you to grapple with it in a different way,” he explained. Indeed, this piece is crafted in the shape of a stereotypical handbag of the era, but due to its hue and material, it stands out among the non-Prada remnants from 20th-century human culture.

OBJECT: PRADA 1990S BACKPACK
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3012 ON GLIESE 667C C, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: NYLON FLECKED WITH ALMANDINE, WHICH ADDS A METALLIC RED HUE TO THIS BLACK BACKPACK’S SURFACE

Initially introduced in the mid-1980s, Prada’s nylon backpacks were among Mrs. Prada’s first successes. The bags epitomize the brand’s tongue-in-cheek approach to luxury and reflect Mrs. Prada’s “sense of resistance and transgression in the very beginning part of her career,” said Rock. “I think the idea that she was really making this business up from scratch sometimes gets lost in the whole story,” he added.

OBJECT: PRADA FALL/WINTER 2005 SPAZZOLATO LEATHER HANDBAG
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3019 ON KEPLER-62 E, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: LEATHER, SPLIT BY VOLATILE CARBON-LIKE ELEMENTS

Prada bags are often “quite minimal and reduced,” said Rock. With this iteration, he analyzed, “the shape and the simplicity of the form, and then with this kind of hard embossing into it, gives it this really special quality.” Handbags, archaeo-anthropologists conjecture, once carried items such as lipstick, currency, and identification cards.

OBJECT: PRADA FALL/WINTER 2023 JACKET
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3028 ON HD 40307 G*, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: CANVAS SLICKED WITH AN UNKNOWN SUBSTANCE CONTAINING TRACE ELEMENTS OF METHIONINE AND LYSINE

Modeled after a jacket that an aristocrat would have worn, Rock believes the humor in this piece is self- evident even a millennium later. “It’s doing the work of fashion and decoration… but it’s also saying we realize this is just a piece of fabric,” he explained. “We all understand the superficiality of it.” This, Rock noted, was a game Mrs. Prada often played in her work.

OBJECT: PRADA SPRING/SUMMER 2024 RE-NYLON BAG ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3027 ON PHOBOS, SATELLITE OF EARTH’S MOON
MATERIALS: NYLON COATED WITH CARBON-RICH SUGARS INCLUDING ARABINOSE AND XYLOSE

All that remains of this opera bag is a crinkled strap, but research shows that it was once attached to an elegant pouch that boasted a skull closure, a reference, historians agree, to the treasures Mrs. Prada’s grandfather would bring home from his travels. “He was a curator of things, an expert world traveler, shopper, and displayer,” said Rock of Mrs. Prada’s grandfather.

OBJECT: PRADA FALL/WINTER 2023 EMBROIDERED SKIRT
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3022 ON KEPLER-22 B, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: SATIN INFUSED WITH ALPHA ACIDS, WHICH ARE TRANS-ISOHUMULONE-BOUND TO AN UNIDENTIFIABLE ORGANIC COMPOUND ON ITS EXTERIOR

Decadent satin material with embellishments appears “almost accidentally attached,” said Rock of this skirt. This allows the garment to be “both luxurious and also expose its mechanisms.” Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons turned this classic form on its head to expose the rawness of its ornaments, thus making a commentary on their era’s obsession with perfection. Perfection, as a concept, was pushed by highly edited photography that appeared on Instagram, a popular social media network during the 21st century. Some experts believe that people called “influencers” made money off of this platform, but their research is not definitive.

OBJECT: PRADA FALL/WINTER 2012 SPAZZOLATO LEATHER SHOES
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3009 ON GLIESE 581 G*, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: RUBBER AND LEATHER DRIPPING WITH AN UNIDENTIFIABLE RED SUBSTANCE CONTAINING TRACE ELEMENTS OF NICKEL OXIDE

These shoes display “two entirely different processes coming into one: handmade perfect leather craft and then this dipped industrial coating,” says Rock. The Prada expert describes this human footwear as a quintessential example of the Prada paradox, in which the challenging and the beautiful, the utilitarian and the luxurious, coexisted in conceptual and aesthetic harmony.

OBJECT: PRADA SPRING/SUMMER 2024 DRESS
ORIGIN: ITALY, DISCOVERED IN 3015 ON GLIESE 163 C, EXOPLANET
MATERIALS: LEATHER COVERED IN A NEAR-IMPENETRABLE SHELL OF PALLADIUM

Assembled from strips of leather, this dress was essentially “made from reduction,” Rock says. “It’s almost nothing, but then the drape makes it everything.”