The most technically critical layer of Axiom Space‘s next-generation lunar spacesuit will be the one no one ever sees — and Prada was chosen to design it because no other company had spent twenty years solving the same problem of keeping a human body functional under extreme physical stress. At Prada’s SoHo headquarters in New York City, Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG): the inner layer of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), engineered to protect astronauts during up to eight-hour spacewalks on the surface of the Moon. The reveal had something deliberately paradoxical about it — an invisible garment, presented like a collection, in a luxury flagship, by a house whose authority in high-performance materials runs directly from two decades of competitive sailing.
The LCVG is the layer worn closest to the astronaut’s body, and its performance requirements are more demanding than those of the suit’s outer shell. As crew members perform spacewalks, their bodies generate significant metabolic heat; the garment circulates cold water through a network of tubes routed across the body’s major muscle groups, absorbing heat and carrying it away to the suit’s portable life-support system, where it is expelled into space. A separate loop delivers fresh oxygen continuously across the astronaut’s face, washing away exhaled carbon dioxide before the gas routes back through the CO2 scrubber. “Every minute astronauts spend outside their vehicle, the LCVG is working to keep them safe,” said Russell Ralston, Axiom Space Senior Vice President of Spacecraft Development. “It manages their thermal environment, supports their breathing, and does it all while they’re pushing their bodies to the limit.”
The engineering specificity of the LCVG goes beyond thermal regulation. Unlike legacy cooling and ventilation garments, the Axiom Space version features a fully redundant cooling circuit — a backup system available if the primary loop fails. On the lunar south pole, where the temperature differential between a sunlit zone and a shaded area can exceed 200 degrees Celsius and there is no atmosphere to moderate conditions, redundancy is not a contingency plan. It is a structural requirement. The suit, Ralston noted, is not a garment in the conventional sense: it is “a spacecraft for one person.”
Prada’s qualification for this project is not theoretical. Since the 1990s, the house has been developing high-performance technical textiles for Luna Rossa, the Italian sailing team, investing over a billion euros in materials research driven by the extreme physical demands of competitive offshore racing. The same engineering knowledge — engineered knitting, advanced 3D modeling techniques, precise pattern-making under physical stress — that produced race-winning sailing gear now informs a garment that must conform to a body working at maximum exertion for eight consecutive hours in vacuum. “We have developed a garment that neither company could have created independently,” said Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, Axiom Space CEO. “That is exactly the kind of cross-industry thinking that will define the next era of human spaceflight.”
The LCVG deepens a partnership that began in 2024, when Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the outer layer of the AxEMU — the suit’s exterior shell, built to withstand the thermal extremes and micrometeoroid environment of the lunar south pole. Moving inward from the outermost protective shell to the layer worn against the astronaut’s skin follows a logical progression: the 2024 reveal demonstrated that luxury craftsmanship could meet aerospace structural requirements; the LCVG tests whether it can meet the most intimate and most critical performance threshold of all. “Today, we are proud to present a new achievement born from the unique combination of Axiom Space’s pioneering expertise and Prada’s know-how in design, patternmaking, and advanced materials,” said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group Chief Marketing Officer.
The choice of Prada’s New York flagship as the venue for the reveal is not incidental. The LCVG will never be photographed in use, never visible under the AxEMU’s outer layers during an actual mission. Presenting it in a designed retail environment — in full light, on display, surrounded by the visual language of luxury — is a deliberate editorial decision. It insists that the garment be read as a designed object, not just an engineered component. The move belongs to the same logic that has driven Prada’s investments in architecture, art, and cultural programming: the claim that design thinking and material intelligence are not supplementary to function but constitutive of it.
The NASA lunar mission context sharpens the stakes. Artemis IV, the mission for which the AxEMU is being developed, is approximately eighteen months away. Axiom Space will deliver a prototype to NASA before the end of 2026 for qualification testing and astronaut training — a timeline Cirtain described as short by the standards of the space industry. When astronauts return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than fifty years, the LCVG will be among the few layers separating them from an environment that allows no margin for material failure. “The future of space exploration will not be built by any one entity alone,” Cirtain said. “By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering and luxury craftsmanship, we have developed a garment that neither company could have created independently.”
The Prada x Axiom Space collaboration asks a question that runs through every serious crossover between fashion and engineering: at what point does material knowledge developed in one extreme context become transferable to another? Luna Rossa racing and lunar surface exploration share almost nothing in terms of environment — one is oceanic, the other is vacuum — but both demand garments that must perform without failure under sustained physical exertion, in conditions that punish any design compromise. The answer Prada and Axiom Space are proposing is that the knowledge transfers not because the environments are similar but because the human body’s thermal and respiratory requirements remain constant regardless of where it is asked to perform.
The most significant claim embedded in the LCVG project is not technological — it is organizational. A luxury fashion house and a commercial space exploration company have produced something that, by both parties’ account, neither could have reached independently. If the garment performs as designed during Artemis IV, it will constitute a proof of concept for a model of cross-industry collaboration in which the material intelligence accumulated in one field becomes structural capital in another. The risk is that this model produces results that are extraordinary in specific conditions but difficult to replicate at scale — that the LCVG is a remarkable exception rather than a template. The Moon will provide the test.