On Sunday, inside a flagship Prada store in New York, the worlds of luxury fashion and aerospace engineering collided with the unveiling of the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment, the high-performance inner layer of the AxEMU spacesuit designed for NASA's Artemis lunar missions. The garment, a collaboration between Prada and Houston-based Axiom Space, will be one of the few layers standing between astronauts and the unforgiving environment of space when humans return to the Moon.
The LCVG resembles a piece of premium activewear more than traditional space hardware. From the v-neck collar to thumbhole sleeves and throwback stirrup pants, it carries Prada's design language into territory no luxury house has entered before. A signature red stripe runs through the garment, while tech tubing is knitted directly into the fabric, circulating cold water across the body's major muscle groups to manage heat during up to eight-hour spacewalks.
Unlike legacy cooling garments that required tubes threaded through mesh material, a painstaking process, the new design embeds cooling channels directly into engineered knit fabric. The suit also features a separate loop of larger black tubes that deliver fresh oxygen across an astronaut's face, washing away exhaled carbon dioxide before routing it back through a life-support scrubber. Crucially, the Axiom Space LCVG includes a fully redundant cooling circuit, providing a backup system should the primary loop fail.
Axiom Space CEO Dr Jonathan Cirtain was direct about the significance: this is a safety suit first, but one that happens to be aesthetically accomplished. Prada's materials expertise also contributed to the ballistic outer layer of the full AxEMU suit, helping it maintain integrity against micrometeoroids and the extreme thermal environment of the lunar South Pole, where temperature differentials between sunlight and shadow can exceed 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
The collaboration continues an unlikely but logical tradition. When NASA built the Apollo spacesuits, they worked with ILC Dover, a Delaware company connected to Playtex, whose expert sewists and knowledge of nylon produced suits astronauts could actually move in. Over fifty years later, Prada's mastery of engineered textiles and innovative patternmaking is performing a similar function for a new generation of explorers.
Prada'sChief Marketing Officer Lorenzo Bertelli described the LCVG as a new achievement born from the unique combination of Axiom's aerospace expertise and Prada's design and materials knowledge. The Artemis IV mission, currently slated for 2028, will be the first to land humans on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. The suit is also likely to be tested aboard the International Space Station and in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory before that mission launches.
