As another month of fashion shows came to a close, the daunting task of having had to attend upwards of 15 to 20 presentations and shows a day is but a fleeting memory. The same can’t be said for the productions designers put on—all in the hopes of standing out from the competition while, in this digital age, creating an Instagram-worthy photo op.
Three fashion powerhouses—Alessandro Michele at Gucci, Raf Simons at Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel—were among the top contenders for best show production of the season. But what was most interesting is that while the shows in Milan and Paris tend to value historical venues over prefabricated works of art, this season more designers than ever sought to mold their own show identity. Here’s a look at the most memorable moments from Milan and Paris fashion weeks.
Milan Fashion Week's Prada show on September 24, held at the brand's Via Fogazzaro headquarters, was transformed by suspending vertical translucent sheets from the ceiling, courtesy of OMA's analysis arm AMO. The smoother fiberglass and polycarbonate surfaces were fixed at 90-degree angles to every other, glowing from ceiling-mounted spotlights.
For its Spring 2016 show during Milan Fashion Week on September 23, Gucci's Alessandro Michele returned to the Scalo Farini, a former train station where the house had previously shown its Spring 2016 menswear line. The outdoor location was decorated with divans in patterns from the collection and an ornate snake-print carpet.
For what would turn out to be his final show as creative director of Dior, Raf Simons, on October 2, turned the Louvre's palace courtyard into a fragrant blooming peak. Landscape artist Eric Chauvin spent 18 days culling enough delphinium blossoms and soil to create the biodynamic set for the Paris Fashion Week outing.
It took more than 300 hours of manual labor to plant the flowers (more than 400,000 of them) on both the outside and inside of the 21,527-square-foot venue. Inside the glossy white space, a robotic lighting apparatus detached from the structure provided the necessary runway lighting.
Set to a runway track of mainly East and West Coast rap, Alexander Wang's swan song October 2 Balenciaga show, held at a chapel on the Rue de Sèvres during Paris Fashion Week, featured reflecting pools erected in the center of the runway that complemented the ethereal, all-white collection.
For his Spring 2016 show on October 6, Karl Lagerfeld transformed the Grand Palais into his very own Chanel airport. In a world where air travel is glamorous, a pristine state-of-the-art Chanel Airlines terminal greeted guests upon arrival—complete with a faux airport exterior.
The departures board heralded flights to the cities of Chanel events: Shanghai, Dubai, Salzburg, New York, and the upcoming London and Rome. Not only was Chanel luggage shown on the runway, but so were cheeky sporty sandals with embedded LED bulbs that mimicked airplane floor lights.
A Chanel Airlines check-in counter was one of the many details meticulously recreated for the show. Ground service attendants were beautifully and impeccably turned out.
Guests arriving at the Grand Palais entered a venue composed of soaring opaque walls that heralded the start of a fashion adventure that would be unlike any airport check-in.
The October 4 Kenzo show at the Paris Event Center saw event producer Etienne Russo devise a show whose set featured moving stages. The runway featured a series of platform blocks that gently moved out into the venue, assembling into a runway. At the end of the show, they served as a platform for guests to get up close to the models.
Held at the Fondation Louis Vuitton on the outskirts of Paris, the Louis Vuitton show took guests on a journey to the digital frontier. The mega black-box structure erected and set up with an enormous video installation was intended to drive home the point of Vuitton's digital-age ascendancy.
Devised by Nicolas Ghesquière, the runway was lined with video screens, black until the show began, with a reference to the popular game Minecraft.
The Céline show on October 4 at the Tennis Club de Paris saw the sparse venue transformed into a primary-color space constructed by FOS, a Danish installation artist. Packed with dirt floors, the venue suggested something between a festival hangout and an art biennial set to a mechanistic drumming.
Some designers prefer to let their choice of venue do all the talking. To wit, Stella McCartney has shown nearly every show, in recent memory, at the time-tested Beaux-Arts opera house Palais Garnier. That included her spring show, which took place on October 5.
Held in a vast concrete warehouse at 107 Rue du Chemin Vert, the September 30 Dries Van Noten show had models walking the expansive space set with mood lighting and to the strains of a live performance by the string quartet Balanescu.
Lanvin returns to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts each season, but Alber Elbaz's October 1 show set stood out for the chain pulls hanging from the ceiling and the sign made of bright lights that read “Lanvin” behind the catwalk.
