Prada Flowers in a Can: When Fashion Meets Sustainability

Halfway between art, nature and fashion, an initiative that caught the eyes — and hearts — of those walking through the streets of Milan, London, Paris and New York has just concluded: the Prada Flowers in a Can, distributed through branded pop-up kiosks. The operation, part of the “In Conversation with a Flower” campaign for Fall/Winter 2023, brought to the world’s most iconic squares a simple and poetic idea: a can with seeds, ready to sprout.

Ephemeral Beauty and Silent Strength

In the campaign’s official statement, Prada describes flowers as “totems and gestures of tenderness and affection,” reinvented on a monumental scale to enable a conversation between humans and flowers. Photographs by Willy Vanderperre depict actors immersed in surreal settings, interacting with giant flowers that embody contradictions: fragile yet resilient, fleeting yet eternal, precious yet everyday.

This poetic tension — between what is delicate and what endures — finds a perfect expression in the gesture of the Prada Flowers in a Can: a small, discreet object holding the potential for growth.
The giant flower of the image becomes microscopic inside the can, but retains the same symbolic charge — an invitation to make beauty, time, and care converse.

Pop-up kiosks and global outreach

During Fashion Week, Prada set up pop-up kiosks in the central squares of each city, transforming them into points of direct contact with the public. Here, personalized Flowers in a Can were handed out — a gesture that broke free from the exclusivity of the runway and opened itself to the street, to everyone passing by.

The project itself lasted only a few days, adding a sense of urgency and desire. In some cities — such as Milan — the kiosks were organized in collaboration with local florists, grounding the experience in place and community.
This itinerant action ensured that the message didn’t remain confined to the shows, but spread among people, in the everyday rhythm of global cities — drawing long queues of people waiting to receive their own Prada Flower in a Can.

The union of online and offline

In the days following distribution, many recipients documented the growth of their seedlings on social media, turning that small gesture into a collective story. The cans — initially mere gadgets — became symbols of an idea that keeps blooming. The “In Conversation with a Flower” campaign generated powerful visual content, playing with scale and the relationship between models and nature, while the Prada Flowers in a Can project gave tangible form to that narrative — putting the metaphor’s power directly in people’s hands.

Fashion, poetry, and environmental responsibility

The power of the initiative lies in its dual nature: aesthetic and tangible. Prada didn’t just create poetic imagery — it materialized it through an object that defies ephemerality: the act of nurturing, day after day, a living flower.
The project shows that luxury communication can have an ethical horizon without losing its evocative force.
The gadget isn’t just a giveaway, but a medium that tells a story: “cultivate with us this idea, this message, this thought.”
The Prada Flowers in a Can are a small gesture — yet a real one — that requires participation and care.

After the event: continuous growth

Weeks later, many of the distributed seeds have sprouted, the plants have grown, and the images continue to live on social media. What began as a temporary installation — an idea for Fashion Week — has extended into people’s everyday lives.

The Prada Flowers in a Can transcend the boundaries of fashion: they become living traces, small testimonies of an idea that seeks to escape the realm of the ephemeral.
In this way, Prada turned a single event into an expanding story — a green carpet stretching beyond the catwalk.
After all, every flower — big or small — is an invitation: to converse with time, with care, with nature. And Prada chose to open that conversation, giving each person a can, a seed, a gesture to nurture.