On a cloudless West Texas morning in June, when it’s in the low nineties by 10:30 a.m., Prada Marfa feels far away from the rest of the world. At first, the only sound you hear is the chiming in the breeze of thousands of padlocks that visitors have clasped to a waist-high fence over the years.

Soon, however, the tourists arrive. They come on hard-worn Harleys and in luxe RVs, in F-150s and Honda crossovers. There are young families and retirement-age siblings and child-free couples and twentysomething bros wearing backward mesh caps. They are perplexed, amused, smiling. (“Guess it’s closed today,” one jokes.) Junichi Goto, an apron and bandanna designer from Japan who learned about this famous art installation on Instagram, has been here once before. He decided to make a second trip to M

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