Prada going to the moon sounds like a bit, and yet, here we are. The Italian fashion house first linked up with Houston aerospace company Axiom Space in 2024 to design the outer shell of NASA’s next moonwalking spacesuit. Now the partnership has worked its way inward, unveiling the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG): the high-tech layer that sits closest to an astronaut’s skin.
Why Prada Was in the Room
The obvious question is what a luxury label is doing on a NASA contract in the first place, and the answer is more technical than you might expect. Prada brought its engineered knitting and 3D modeling chops to the table, along with the materials expertise to source specialized fibers that survive repeated wear across long missions.
A cooling garment that wears out after a handful of uses is dead weight on a multi-week lunar stay, and aerospace engineers don’t exactly moonlight as textile designers.
Keeping Cool in a 400-Degree Swing
The LCVG’s main job is heat management, and there’s a lot of it to manage. Astronauts cook themselves with metabolic heat during a spacewalk, so the garment runs cold water through a web of tubes across the major muscle groups, pulling that heat back to the suit’s life-support pack, which then dumps it into space.
Unlike older cooling suits, the LCVG has some new features including a fully redundant cooling circuit that’s designed to kick in if the primary loop fails. This feature is critical for survival at the lunar South Pole, where temperatures can swing a brutal 400-plus degrees between the sunlight and shadow.
A separate loop handles breathing, washing fresh oxygen across the face and routing exhaled CO2 back through a scrubber. The whole system runs for spacewalks as long as eight hours.
It Actually Looks Like Activewear
Function aside, the thing does look fantastic. Picture a v-neck base layer with thumb-hole sleeves, throwback stirrup pants, exposed tech-y tubing, and Prada’s signature Linea Rossa red stripe running through it. It feels more like high-performance gym fit beamed in from 2050 than astronaut gear.
There’s substance under the styling, too. Instead of threading the cooling tubes through mesh by hand, an old and painstaking process, Axiom and Prada knit channels directly into the garment to hold them. it’s faster to build, and cleaner to look at.
Spec Sheet
Product: Axiom Space x Prada Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG)
Type: Spacesuit inner layer (worn under the AxEMU)
Function: Liquid cooling and ventilation
Cooling: Cold-water tube network with a fully redundant backup circuit
Ventilation: Oxygen delivery and CO2 scrubbing across the face
Spacewalk Duration: Up to 8 hours
Construction: Engineered knitting with tubes embedded in knit channels
Design Partner: Prada
Mission: NASA Artemis IV (lunar South Pole)
Pricing & Availability
This one isn’t going up for pre-order. The LCVG is mission hardware bound for NASA’s Artemis IV, currently targeted for 2028, which will put a four-person crew on the lunar South Pole and mark the first human Moon landing in more than 50 years. Axiom has hinted the suit could see earlier testing aboard the ISS or during the non-landing Artemis 3 flight in 2027.
Recap
Axiom Space x Prada LCVG NASA Spacesuit
Prada and Axiom Space unveiled the liquid-cooled inner layer of NASA’s next Moon suit, a knit garment with redundant cooling, eight-hour endurance, and enough Linea Rossa red to look runway-ready.
