CULTURE

The Postman Wears Prada

Autumn de Wilde romanticizes obsession in a new film series for the brand.


Autumn de Wilde for Prada

When tasked with creating a series of short films celebrating the Prada Galleria bag, photographer and director Autumn de Wilde decided to take a slightly unconventional route: exploring the idea of obsession via a sleeping postman and his comedic fantasies, sound tracked by a Prada-clad street band called The Blasting Company. Drawing on everything from silent film stars like the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, to her own stamp collection, de Wilde depicts the postman’s dreams of a stairwell make out session, a boyhood playtime, a tree that grows handbags, and a laundromat striptease. “I wanted to have a variety of characters who could transform a bag for different reasons,” de Wilde says. For the young boy in the third film, an army green Galleria becomes the perfect stage for a war between his toy soldiers and his mother’s candy colored Prada jewelry. “The boy obsesses over the bag—it smells good, it holds a lot of army men, and it’s the perfect color for a battlefield,” she says. “I like reminding people that obsession over objects exists in different ways.”