Prada Stages “Satellites II” by Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Koji at the Chelsea Hotel

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Some of the most interesting creative partnerships don't run on shared language — they run on shared frequency. That's the premise, and the proof, behind "Satellites II," the site-specific installation that Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and legendary game designer Hideo Kojima staged inside New York's Chelsea Hotel for Prada Mode, the brand's 14th edition of its traveling, private members-only social club. According to Harper's Bazaar, the two men consider each other "twins" and "best friends" despite the fact that they share no common tongue — their entire creative dialogue happens through images, music, and feeling.

"We can only communicate through images and music," Refn said at a press conference inside the hotel. "So the idea of taking our conversation and recreating it in as many languages as possible was a way to deconstruct how we talk — because it's really all about the purity of emotions." Kojima, speaking through a translator, was equally deliberate about the nature of their bond: "We are maintaining our good distance together, just like satellites rotating around each other." A joint build, he made clear, would have ended in a fight and the friendship. Instead, they orbit.

Silver Screens and Analog Dreams

The Chelsea delivers as a setting in every possible way. Three hotel rooms were converted into thematic television studios broadcasting live on Prada's website. The lobby bar is stacked with pairs of retro TV sets, each showing Refn and Kojima's faces rendered in blue against black — two heads in conversation across a language barrier. The Bard Room, packed with glimmering silver furniture and anchored by a shimmering curtain and a neon Prada Mode sign, hosted talks and concerts by The Velveeteers and Miho Hatori. Every member of the hotel staff was dressed in retro-futuristic silver. The color wasn't arbitrary — Refn likens it to the metallic interior of a dismantled television set, a material memory of when technology felt intimate and full of wonder.

That nostalgia is the emotional engine here. Both creators grew up using television as a portal to the unreachable world — Refn in Copenhagen, where broadcast options were nearly nonexistent; Kojima in Japan, where flipping channels meant glimpsing New York, London, everywhere, without ever boarding a plane. "It wasn't about the language," Kojima said. "It was about the visuals, the music, the sound." Silver, for both of them, became shorthand for optimism — Space Age hopefulness, the belief that the future, however complicated, will eventually be bright. "Satellites II" follows a first iteration staged at Prada Aoyama Tokyo in 2025, where the concept debuted with a similar analog aesthetic and focus on human connection.

For anyone not in New York, the Prada Mode channel livestreamed the full run — programming that included an Ancient Aliens conversation between Refn and Danish radio presenter Mikael Bertelsen and a story read aloud by Maya Hawke. Open to the public June 5–7, the installation was equal parts art project, fashion event, and genuinely moving argument for wordless intimacy.

When two of the most visually fluent minds in their respective fields stop talking and start transmitting, the result is the kind of fashion moment that actually earns the word art.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.