At this year's Art Basel Miami Beach, Prada launched Prada Mode Miami, a pop-up members-only club that featured a tightly edited program of art, music and dining.
The Italian label teamed up with Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, whose current exhibition at Milan's Fondazione Prada, "The Black Corporation," showcases images from Ebony and Jet magazines that helped shape the aesthetic, narrative and history of black identity in the 20th century.
"'The Black Image Corporation' is a redeployment of an image archive, and an attempt to wed it to fashion so that the images are amplified," Gates explained. "And in some cases, these are images that have never been seen.
"It's a way of celebrating the black American image, but also a way of celebrating the under-known photographers and creatives in the context for which those images were made, which is exactly this context."
Gates' site-specific installation at the Freehand Miami hotel, host of the inaugural Prada Mode, was an offshoot of his larger exhibition. It featured captivating black and white pictures from the aforementioned magazines that paid homage to the history of African American women.
These nuanced images reimagined the black identity and taught people about the history of black women in America at a time when they were largely invisible in mainstream media.