PRADA MODE NEW YORK: NICOLAS WINDING REFN AND HIDEO KOJIMA BUILD A WORLD INSIDE THE HOTEL CHELSEA

For the fourteenth edition of Prada Mode, the filmmaker and the game creator transformed one of New York’s most mythic addresses into a meditation on friendship, creativity, failure, and the strange ways humans continue to connect.

There are places that exist beyond architecture. Places that accumulate stories until they become myths.

The Hotel Chelsea is one of them.

For decades, the legendary New York hotel has served as a sanctuary for artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and dreamers. Its corridors have witnessed countless acts of creation and destruction, reinvention and escape. It is fitting, then, that Prada Mode chose the Chelsea as the setting for its fourteenth edition—a project conceived in collaboration with filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and video game creator Hideo Kojima, two artists whose work continually explores the boundaries between reality and imagination.

Presented during the Tribeca Festival, Prada Mode New York unfolded over several days as an extension of Satellites, the exhibition first presented by Refn and Kojima at Prada Aoyama Tokyo in 2025. If the original project explored the relationship between love, language, and artistic dialogue, Satellites II expanded those questions outward, examining communication across cultures, generations, identities, and creative disciplines.

The result was neither an exhibition nor a festival in the traditional sense. Instead, Prada Mode functioned as a living environment—a temporary world built around conversation.

Throughout the Chelsea, public and private spaces merged into a narrative journey. Guests moved between intimate rooms and communal gatherings, encountering performances, workshops, screenings, and discussions that challenged conventional ideas about artistic production.

At the center of the programme was an ongoing dialogue between Refn and Kojima themselves. Despite working in different mediums, both artists share a fascination with storytelling, mythology, loneliness, and human connection. Their friendship became the conceptual framework of the event, suggesting that creativity often emerges not from certainty, but from exchange.

This theme echoed throughout a series of conversations featuring filmmaker Abel Ferrara, poet and activist Amanda Gorman, actress and musician Sophie Thatcher, journalist Michael Musto, and others. Together they explored subjects ranging from youth and artistic influence to the productive role of failure in creative life.

Failure, in particular, emerged as a recurring motif. Rather than celebrating artistic mastery, many of the discussions focused on uncertainty, experimentation, and the inevitability of mistakes. Creativity was presented not as a process of control, but as a willingness to embrace vulnerability.

Elsewhere, music and performance activated the building. Lydia Lunch brought her singular blend of poetry and provocation. The Velveteers performed. Sophie Thatcher stepped from cinema into music. Workshops by Juno the Bakery and KROM Kendama offered alternative forms of participation, transforming spectators into collaborators.

The programme extended beyond the physical space through the Prada Mode Channel, a dedicated broadcast platform inspired by the aesthetics of analogue television. Conceived with Danish journalist and filmmaker Mikael Bertelsen, the channel featured talk shows, horoscopes, interviews, and experimental programming that blurred the boundaries between entertainment and artistic inquiry.

Appropriately, New York itself became part of the narrative.

The city’s ghosts hovered over conversations such as Ghosts of New York, while its cultural mythology informed every aspect of the project. From the Hotel Chelsea to Katz's Delicatessen, where Grandmaster Flash headlined a late-night celebration, Prada Mode positioned the city not merely as a backdrop but as an active participant.

In many ways, the event reflected a broader cultural longing. At a moment when communication has become instantaneous yet increasingly fragmented, Satellites II proposed a slower model of connection. One built on friendship, curiosity, and the willingness to listen.

For a few days inside the Chelsea, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and audiences gathered to share ideas rather than conclusions. The result was less an event than a temporary community.

A satellite, after all, only exists because it remains connected to something larger than itself.