Filmed and photographed in action by the Los Angeles-based visual artist Martine Syms, the unique talents chosen to front the Prada Linea Rossa Spring 2021 campaign epitomize excellence – each with a tie, directly, to the sport of skating or BMX riding, and therefore to the urban topographies.

Cai Xu Kun is a world-famous Chinese singer-songwriter and record producer, whose multiple skills also include the sport of rollerblading. Briana King is a skateboarder, model, and community organizer from East Los Angeles. She is well-known for organizing and touring girl and queer skateboarding meet-ups around the world. Rachelle Vinberg is a passionate actor and skateboarder, who roled in the 2018 film Skate Kitchen and a subsequent HBO TV series Betty, both based on her real-life experiences as part of a female skate crew. Austin Augie is a photographer and award-winning professional BMX rider, with over half a million subscribers on YouTube. Le’Andre Sanders, a talented local Los Angelean skateboarder, plays a cameo role.

The collection is lightweight and streamlined, engineered to a dynamism representative of the contemporary world. Silhouettes alternate between body-hugging and free-flowing, all emphasizing locomotion – the energy of movement. Both men’s and womenswear share traits: a sharply-focussed palette of white, black and grey with the iconic Linea Rossa.

As always, technical fabric innovation is fundamental. Polyester knit fabrics delineates the body, a basis for fluid layers of tecno-knit and nylon – thin, lightweight and waterproof ripstop, whose semi-translucence allows glimpses of the form in motion.