The lobby bar of the Hotel Chelsea is broadcasting horoscopes. Prada Mode has arrived in New York, and it has brought Hideo Kojima and Nicolas Winding Refn with it.
Satellites II is the fourteenth edition of Prada Mode, the house’s travelling arts club, and it has claimed the Chelsea as its hub through June 14. The Danish filmmaker and the Japanese game creator built the programme together, timing it to the Tribeca Film Festival running across the city. Their subject is communication and human connection across language, culture and space.
The pairing began in Tokyo. In 2025 the two staged Satellites at Prada Aoyama, an exploration of love, language and creativity that paired Refn’s cinema with Kojima’s game design. The sequel moves the conversation to a hotel that has housed more artists per floor than most institutions manage per century.
The Chelsea
Upstairs, Prada has taken three rooms. One is finished in chrome, one recalls clouds at sunset, one is dressed as a control room. What gets filmed in them feeds the screens downstairs.
Those screens are the takeover’s strangest pleasure. Set into the lobby bar, styled after analogue television, they carry Prada Mode Channel, a livestream built with Mikael Bertelsen that runs from talk shows to horoscopes. Guests drink beneath a broadcast being made above their heads.
The preview days, June 3 and 4, set the register. Refn and Kojima talked first with the actress and musician Sophie Thatcher, then with Abel Ferrara. The Velveteers, Lydia Lunch and Precious performed, William Benton played a DJ set, Juno the Bakery ran cake-decorating workshops, and a kendama demonstration put a Japanese wooden skill toy in front of a downtown crowd. Day two brought Amanda Gorman, a Thatcher performance and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto.
Pastrami
At night the club moved downtown to Katz’s Delicatessen, where Grandmaster Flash, Papi Juice and Justin Strauss kept a party running among the pastrami sandwiches. The deli stays in the programme for the public run, serving a menu created with Sam Lawrence of Bridges.
The footprint spreads from there. The Angelika Film Center hosts screenings, the Prada store on Broadway carries an installation, and branded vending machines scattered across the locations dispense pins, stickers and the occasional better prize.
A private club with no fixed address takes a room at the hotel where New York has always kept its artists.
The Splendid EditThe club moves
Prada Mode has worked this way since its first editions. The club has set up at 180 The Strand in London, in Moscow, Dubai and Los Angeles, in Seoul, Shanghai, Paris and Hong Kong, each time pairing a cultural figure with a borrowed building. In 2023 it landed at Tokyo’s Teien Art Museum, with site-specific works curated by Kazuyo Sejima and a curved wooden pavilion by Ryue Nishizawa in the museum’s European garden.
Prada Mode Tokyo at the Teien Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of Prada
New York gets the noisier version. Where Tokyo offered tea-ceremony discourse under a wooden canopy, the Chelsea offers Grandmaster Flash and a deli counter. The framework holds either way: a city, a building with a past, and a programme dense enough to reward a full day inside it.
The public run opened June 9 and closes Sunday, with registration open on Prada’s site. Go for the screens, stay for the sandwich, and try the vending machines on the way out.