Prada Is Going To Space
In space, nobody can hear you rizz. Prada’s designs are out of this world. Not only is it a luxury fashion house on Earth, but in space it is providing the critical service of keeping astronauts comfortable and thermally regulated.
According to a team of researchers, astronauts appear to exhibit signs of a sort of perpetual fever, with resting body temperatures about one degree higher than those of people under normal gravity on Earth.
“Under weightless conditions, our bodies find it extremely difficult to eliminate excess heat. The transfer of heat between the body and its environment becomes significantly more challenging in these conditions,” says Professor Hanns-Christian Gunga, Deputy Director of the Institute of Physiology.
This runs counter to our expectation that astronauts spend their time freezing up there.
To counter this, Prada has developed a Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG) for Axiom Space. The result is a next-generation garment developed through advanced 3D modelling techniques that maintains cooling and ventilation while enhancing comfort during spacewalks of up to eight hours.
As crew members perform spacewalks, their bodies generate significant metabolic heat.
The LCVG circulates cold water through a network of tubes routed across the body’s major muscle groups, absorbing and carrying the heat away to the suit’s portable life-support system, where it will then be expelled into space. Unlike legacy cooling garments, the Axiom Space LCVG features a fully redundant cooling circuit, ensuring a backup system is available if the primary loop fails.
When astronauts return to the Moon during NASA’s Artemis IV mission, the LCVG will be one of the few layers standing between them and the unforgiving environment of space.
The garment also serves a ventilation function, with a separate loop of tubes delivering fresh oxygen across an astronaut’s face to continuously wash away exhaled carbon dioxide. The gas then routes back through the life-support system’s CO2 scrubber before recirculating oxygen.
“Every minute astronauts spend outside their vehicle, the LCVG is working to keep them safe,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom Space Senior Vice President of Spacecraft Development. “It manages their thermal environment, supports their breathing, and does it all while they’re pushing their bodies to the limit. The work we have done with Prada has taken that capability to a level we could not have achieved alone.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve discussed Prada’s spacesuits. In 2024, the company helped develop an outer shell for Axiom Space capable of withstanding the thermal extremes and micrometeoroid environment of the lunar South Pole.
Honestly, I’d prefer this over a fancy purse or something.