It sticks out like a sore thumb: a tiny luxury boutique on the side of a barren stretch of highway in Far West Texas.
The tiny Prada Marfa fittingly sits just one mile west of the tiny 134-population town of Valentine. It houses bags and shoes from the luxury brand’s Fall 2005 collection that are completely inaccessible to those who stop by.
Here’s what we know about the property origins.
As part of the Weird West Texas series, we explore some of the most odd, eccentric and just plain weird things in our region — from the state’s northernmost town of Hitchland down into the Big Country, eastward to the Rolling Plains and all the way to El Paso.
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The Fate of Prada Marfa: A Texas Icon
One of the most famous roadside attractions in Texas, Prada Marfa is a permanent art project by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset, according to a 2020 story in the El Paso Times that was published in conjunction with the installation’s 15th anniversary.
In an interview with Transmissions via Ballroom Marfa, the two self-made artists — Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen — formulated the concept of the tiny Prada installation after they attached fake signage at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City that Prada was coming.
“People would call and say, ‘Sorry the gallery is closing, but who is designing the Prada store?'” Dragset said in the interview.
According to the El Paso Times, neither artist had a formal background in art education; they actually met in a nightclub in Copenhagen. But they shared a mutual curiosity about the homogeneity of contemporary art, leading them to blend this idea with observations from the high fashion industry.
“We started wondering what is the high fashion industry, how does it look if you take it out of its normal environment, its urban context?” Dragset said in the interview. “We’re not really surprised when they are on Fifth Avenue or in the middle of Paris. But how would they look if you would take them on a survival extreme, out in the middle of the desert where they have to survive on their own? And we got quite obsessed with this idea.”
The small installation was originally slated for Nevada but arrived at Marfa instead because it found the support it needed there when the project was commissioned by Art Production Fund and Ballroom Marfa.
“The small store with nothing around it was also a comment of the landscape,” Dragset said on the radio show. “The landscape is often not noticed if you drive through the Highway 90 and just see the same landscape over again. When you put something that is completely displaced by a small forever closed Prada store, then you suddenly think of where you are, and you also think about how strange this store looks in this context.”
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Is Prada Marfa an illegal advertisement or a museum?
Over the last 19 years, since its inception in 2005, the luxury store has been a hot-button topic on a few occasions. In 2013, the Texas Department of Transportation deliberated whether the sign of the installation constituted an illegal advertisement in violation of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act. This debate followed a ruling earlier that year when Playboy Marfa, a 40-foot Playboy bunny sign commissioned by the magazine, emerged on a nearby stretch of road.
In an interview with Texas Monthly, Elmgreen argued that their installation differed from the Playboy installation because there was no actual business or company associated with their artwork.
“It was not commissioned by Prada […] They never, ever asked me to do advertisement for them,” he said.
Ultimately, it was concluded that Prada Marfa did not violate any laws. Instead, TxDOT officials announced that the structure would be reclassified as a museum, with Prada Marfa as its sole exhibit.
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