Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20

The Instagrammability of the Runway:

Architecture, Scenography, and the Spatial Turn in
Fashion Communications

Silvano Mendes

To cite this article: Silvano Mendes (2019): The Instagrammability of the Runway: Architecture,
Scenography, and the Spatial Turn in Fashion Communications, Fashion Theory, DOI:
10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758

Published online: 04 Jul 2019.

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Fashion Theory
DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758
# 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Silvano Mendes
Silvano Mendes is associate lecturer in
Fashion Communications at ESMOD
and Sorbonne Nouvelle, journalist and
PhD Candidate in Fashion Studies at
IFM/Panthe
on Sorbonne. He has con-
tributed to academic books and jour-
nals such as International Journal of
Fashion Studies (Intellect, 2017),
Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption
(Routledge, 2015) and Fashion
Cultures Revisited: Theories,
Explorations and Analysis (Routledge,
2013).
silvanomendes@hotmail.com
The
Instagrammability
of the Runway:
Architecture,
Scenography, and
the Spatial Turn in
Fashion
Communications
Abstract
From minimalist installation to monumental set design, runway scenog-
raphy is now central to the grammar of fashion communications. Often
used to symbolize the power of the brand or to reaffirm its DNA, the
strategic choices of setting, space, and set design are an integral part of
the promotion of designer fashion. Today’s runway show does not sim-
ply present a collection of clothes against a background set design; it
uses scenography more instrumentally as the setting for brands and
digital influencers to capture images of fashion for followers of online
social media. Architectural paradigms now feed into the symbolic dis-
course of branded fashion and influence the way in which collections
2 Silvano Mendes
This article has been republished with
minor changes. These changes do
not impact the academic content of
the article.
are spectacularized for different audiences. This article analyses the stra-
tegic use of runway scenography as a key part of contemporary branded
communications, exploring specifically how the creative synergies
between fashion and architecture are being reshaped by the impact of
digital social media, in particular by Instagram.
KEYWORDS: fashion show, set design, architecture, instagram,
communication, social media
In his foreword to The Fashion Set: The Art of the Fashion Show
(Poletti and Cantarini 2016), the fashion journalist and writer Colin
McDowell states “any object of beauty needs a setting as a frame to
bring out its perfection. Nowhere is that more true than in high fashion.
[ … ] It is high fashion that creates a real fashion show, in which the sur-
roundings, along with the music, pace and rhythm of the event, all
work as a beautiful setting to make the clothes comes alive and have
meaning” (Poletti and Cantarini 2016, 7). McDowell’s point is that
“high” fashion strives constantly to frame its creative design in order to
reinforce the immaterial or symbolic value of the brand through adver-
tising imagery in magazines, window displays, and fashion films, to take
the most obvious examples. Despite the recent questioning of the rele-
vance of the runway show, and the commercial adoption of “See Now
Buy Now” by a number of big-name brands with an impact on the
practices of journalism, communication, and retail (Mendes 2017), the
fashion show remains the key display mode for promoting and framing
“high” (or designer-branded) fashion through space, set, and production
design (Stark 2018).
The rapid emergence of new fashion weeks across the globe (from
Jakarta and Tbilissi to Dakar and Vienna) and the expansion of the cal-
endar for the established global centers of New York, London, Milan,
and Paris testify to the continued investment in the fashion show as the
central display mode for commercial, cultural, and communicational
reasons. In this context, brands are multiplying strategies to focus atten-
tion on the runway to maximize the potential media impact of the
event. For some time now, there has been a need to go beyond the pres-
entation of the garment to embed set design at the center of the show,
which forms a key part of the grammar of fashion communications.
Often used to symbolize the power of the brand, as in the case of
Italian house of Fendi in 2007, which staged its S/S show on the majes-
tic Great Wall of China, or to reaffirm brand DNA, like the Chanel
jacket in the S/S 2008 show, the strategic choices of topography, space,
and set design are an integral part of the dramatic spectacle and value
of the show. The case of Fendi in China is particularly revealing because
the symbolic impact of the setting was a way for the house to re-affirm
its presence among the pantheon of global luxury leaders with
 Instagrammability of the Runway 3

continuing profits despite the Global Economic Crisis that began to

affect the sector the following year in 2008.
This was not the first time that a fashion house had shown its collec-
tions in China. Pierre Cardin had done as early as 1978 (L€angle 2005,
199), long before the opening of the country to the processes of eco-
nomic globalization, which have led in recent years to its positioning as
a lucrative market for the global luxury brands (Wu 2009, 163). But
beyond the purely economic context, Fendi’s China show also came at a
time when fashion houses sought ever-greater extravagance in the setting
and display of their collections. In the case of other collections of the
period (Fall/Winter 2006–2007), Belgian designer Dries Van Noten cov-
ered his runway with gold leaves; D&G ended its show with a Santa’s
sleigh; and Alexander McQueen staged an imposing hologram of the
supermodel Kate Moss. Since then, in the context of post-digital fashion
in the age of social media, nothing is too spectacular for a brand to
secure the attention of journalists, buyers, and lately influencers, who all
follow the frenetic rhythm of a fashion calendar that has been acceler-
ated by the globalization of the luxury industry and impacted by fast
fashion (Delpal and Jacomet 2014; Thomas 2007).
In this article, I consider the specific role played by setting—the stag-
ing of fashion through the topography and production design of runway
shows—as a key component of branded communications strategy over
the last decade—from roughly 2007 until the present day. I provide a
critical framework through which to theorize the heterotopic dimension
of the fashion show—a movement that was already visible in the 1980s,
but which emerged more fully with the use of “other spaces” to display
collections in the main fashion capitals, as well as the growth in
“cruise” or “resort” collections, in which the desire for escape through
exotic scenery projected through the choice of place, setting, and archi-
tecture, have become a mainstay of fashion imagery today.
Before it is promoted by media coverage and retail display, fashion
passes through an intermediary exhibition and validation stage through
the runway show, where brands try to create a setting to convey the
main idea of the collection through the “perfection” described by
McDowell (Poletti and Cantarini 2016, 7). This strategic use of place,
setting, and scenography sometimes produces timeless fashion spaces.
For example, for her F/W 2019-2020 collection, the designer Marine
Serre invited the press and buyers to a cellar in Issy-les-Moulineaux,
south of Paris, to produce a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. By removing
the audience from the usual spaces of fashion display, creating a timeless
huis clos, the designer’s strategy was to produce an “other space,” a
type of “heterotopia” to use the term first formulated in the mid1960s
by the philosopher Michel Foucault—a concept that will be central to
the overall argument on fashion spaces in this article (Foucault 2009).1
I further argue that fashion’s spatial turn is an emerging phenomenon
that has been more fully realized through the transformation of design
4 Silvano Mendes

by digital image, in which the longing for “grammable” environments

(that is to say, those that are tailor-made for social media diffusion
through Instagram) clearly potentiate the viral impact of fashion brands
through the use of spectacular settings, which aim to enhance the artistic
capital of the brand in an increasingly competitive and saturated
post-media landscape. However, we first need to consider the visual
importance of setting for the fashion show in pre-digital contexts to
understand the longer history of the display mode of fashionable
dress—from the early theatrical presentations concocted by couturiers
such as Worth, Lucile, and Poiret through the development of perform-
ance settings for fashion-art shows in the late twentieth century to the
high-voltage mega-spectacles of the twenty-first century, conditioned by
the twin processes of economic globalization and digital
communication.

Fashion spectacle

The desire for visual impact often leads designers and brands to borrow
aesthetic features from the performing arts—particularly theatre. This
inter-medial transfer is not, however, a recent phenomenon. In the nine-
teenth century, Charles Fr
ed
erick Worth, often recognized as the father
of couture, presented “ball gowns in the flare of the salon lights that
were brighter than necessary so as to show the gowns as they would be
worn” (Grumbach 2008, 17). Worth’s compatriot Lucile, often known
as the first couturiere to employ professional models on a catwalk to
present her collections, also had a heightened sense of staging, in par-
ticular lighting design “as if produced by a magician” (Evans 2013,
151). Paul Poiret, for his part, not only drew on performance to stage
his presentations, but also staged his private life to enhance the myth
surrounding his talent and personality (Berry 2018; Parkins 2012; Poiret
1930; Wollen 1993). In his memoirs, Christian Dior mentions the dra-
matic impact of the presentation of the collection, which resembled a
“dress rehearsal” in front of a specialist audience; he went on to com-
pare the moment to the “stage-fright of the author of a play at the
moment it is under the spotlight” (Guillaume and Veillon 2007, 32).
The link between fashion and performance became so apparent in the
context of post-war France that in March 1945 Paris welcomed an
exhibition of static dolls dressed by some of the most famous couturiers
of the day (from Balenciaga to Schiaparelli) called “The Theatre of
Fashion” which was organized by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute
Couture and staged at the Louvre museum, and which was seen by over
one hundred thousand visitors before touring across Europe.
In her book The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion
Shows in France and America, 1900–1929, Caroline Evans addresses
the theatrical nature of fashion in her analysis of the workings of the
Paris couture houses, in which the wings were compared to the
 Instagrammability of the Runway 5

backstage and the model’s entrance into the salon resembled the actor’s
entrance on stage; the only difference being the size of the curtain sepa-
rating the two spaces in a ritual that “may either veil or disguise the
commercial underpinnings and economic function of the theatrical
event” (Evans 2013, 148). A number of designers took this idea further:
in his futurist collection of 1965, Andr
e Courreges asked the models to
strike innovative poses while they danced to avant-garde concrete music
in a staging that transformed the catwalk presentation into pure image,
thereby “freeing the fashion show from its strict utilitarian and commer-
cial purpose” (Kamitsis 2012, 92). As the curator and designer Olivier
Saillard observes, “it became about showing the spirit of a collection, a
look, a lifestyle as much as the garment itself, which became an image”
(Saillard 2004, 87). Courreges led the way in dramatic experimentation
with the fashion show that was later taken up by designers such as
Kenzo Takada in the 1970s, who sent a model out onto the runway on
horseback in his A/W 1978/1979 collection (Tsujita 2006, 182). From
the 1980s onwards, the fashion show became a pop spectacle in its own
right; as Christopher Breward argues, since then “the language of the
revived catwalk, the supermodel, and the designer label has become a
kind of contemporary Esperanto, immediately accessible across social
and geographical boundaries” (Breward 1995, 229). Designer brands
started to rent out vast venues for their shows in Paris: Jean-Paul
Gaultier at the Grande Halle de la Villette for A/W 1986/87 and
Thierry Mugler at the Zenith concert hall for A/W 1984/85 in a stadium
show for an audience of some two thousand guests and four thousand
fans who paid for their seats as if attending a rock concert (Bott
2009, 33).
The end of the century was marked by the “spectacularization” of
high fashion in shows by designers such as Viktor & Rolf, John
Galliano, Hussein Chalayan, and Alexander McQueen, who famously
re-imagined the presentational space as a hybrid form of performance
art-commercial spectacle. In particular, the work of the Dutch duo
Viktor & Rolf, whose designs have always interested curators as much
as retailers, interrogates the staging of fashion through a dramatic use
of space and setting through a vein of drama inherited from the couture
tradition. In essence, the show became an end in itself. The designers’
early collections consisted of autonomous pieces intended to express
emotion beyond the garment through the apparatus of theatrical staging
and setting. For their A/W 2007/2008 collection ironically titled
“Fashion Show” the models were individually lit by a system of con-
straining metallic structures attached to each body. In this deconstruct-
ive mise en abyme, each model created a personal fashion show through
the incorporation of lighting design. “The presentation, be it a fashion
show or an exhibition, was the finished product,” commented the
designers. “Even though we paid a lot of attention to the execution of
our collections—technique has always been so important to us—the
6 Silvano Mendes

garments were conceived to be seen rather than to be worn” (Kamitsis

2012, 93). In counterpoint, from the 1980s onwards, other designers
were pursuing more alternative performance strategies and, following
the concept of “heterotopia,” turning to “other” more contradictory
and transformative spaces and modes of display through which to pre-
sent fashion design.

“Other spaces” and branded scenography

The history of fashion has been punctuated by moments of drama,

which rely technically on the creative conception of setting and scenog-
raphy in both conventional and experimental contexts. From the 1980s
onwards, unexpected venues began to appear on the list of the main
fashion weeks. In 1984, Katherine Hamnett presented a collection in a
West London car park, while in 1989 Issey Miyake took over a Paris
metro station, and Jean-Paul Gaultier presented his collection in a box-
ing ring. As the French television journalist Yoba Gr
egoire observes in
her report on the phenomenon, “designers began to understand that the
fashion shows were above all vehicles of entertainment that needed
direction” (Gr
egoire 1989). How to show fashion began to matter. This
was indeed the case for Martin Margiela, who excelled in the commer-
cial art of d
etournement, or misappropriation, and whose designs
blended confrontation with transgression, particularly in his
Foucauldian vision of fashion as heterotopic (Foucault 2009)—when he
chose to present collections in disaffected urban spaces such as waste-
lands or deserted car-parks in working-class parts of the city (Samson
and Saillard 2018). Margiela’s heirs, notably Demna Gvasalia, continue
this critical line of inquiry that Foucault termed the “obsessions of
space” (Foucault 1976, 71) by organizing shows for his collective label
Vetements in unusual, subversive, or culturally devalued spaces such as
gay cruising bars and Chinese restaurants. Like Margiela before him, by
ironically re-appropriating or even “recycling these spaces” (Str€omberg
2019), Gvasalia sets up a conversation between the narratives of space
and the construction of fashion by playing with their symbolic meanings
and values. This is also a strategic way of following the lineage of
avant-garde artists of the second half of the twentieth century, like
Allan Kaprow, who occupied derelict spaces and warehouses and took
advantage of the freedom these heterotopic spaces offered them to
invent radically “other” or new temporal forms of spectacle (Semet-
Haviaras 2017, 211).
In the context of avant-garde art performance practice, such happen-
ings aimed to take the audience out of the protected space of the gallery
and into the actual space of the city. In his book The Fashion of
Architecture, Bradley Quinn argues “as a setting for fashion, non-places
and heterotopias are intended to generate a realistic feel, beckoning the
viewer in an urban wasteland whose inhabitants have salvaged their
 Instagrammability of the Runway 7

clothing, but not the world they live in” (Quinn 2003, 31). However, in
the case of a heavily promotional industry such as fashion, is it at all
possible to talk only of a desire to capture and transcribe the real on the
runway? According to Foucault’s spatial formula, heterotopias can also
have an illusory function in relation to other spaces, or can function as
idealized or perfect spaces in themselves. Examples of this idea trans-
posed to the runway would include Chanel ready-to-wear S/S 2019,
which recreated a life-size beach in the Grand Palais, and Louis Vuitton
A/W 2019, for which the designer Nicolas Ghesquiere staged an archi-
tectural reproduction of the modern Pompidou Centre in the classical
Cour Carr
ee of the Louvre Museum—an ambitious piece of staging that
went beyond the mise en abyme of the museum inside the museum to
engage with Foucault’s understanding of heterotopic illusion and perfec-
tion. The aim is therefore to create maximum impact through disrup-
tion, the term currently used to denote the shaping of contemporary
design practice by image and communications.
Beyond the runway’s disruptive dimension, other characteristics of
this ritual follow the principles of heterotopia theorized by Foucault.
One example is its temporal structure—beyond the questions of “fast”
and “slow” fashion. Whether a runway show is part of the calendar of
a fashion week or as a stand-alone event (such as a resort collection), it
contains an element of temporal discontinuity, what Foucault termed
“heterochronias” (Foucault 1998, 182), indicating spaces that break
with established temporality, spaces that exist outside of time, such as
Dior’s futuristic cubes anachronistically installed in the garden of the
eighteenth-century Rodin Museum, or others that are temporary and in
the space of a few days completely transform their surroundings
(Figure 1). Foucault took the examples of transitory “chronic” heteroto-
pias such as festivals and fairs that repeatedly modify a place once they
set up camp. Thus fashion weeks alter the everyday configuration of a
city by temporarily transforming an environment through the event, and
the social and commercial interaction of the guests and public with their
surroundings. A striking example of the transformation of the cityscape
would be the Saint Laurent F/W 2019–20 show in February 2019, when
the house occupied the esplanade opposite the Eiffel Tower for 15 days
with some 600 tons of scaffolding to erect a giant box in which to stage
the show.
Beyond the individual creative discourse of designers, there is a fur-
ther reason for the strategic branded use of these “other” spaces to dis-
play fashion. For a long time, this type of practice of showing in
alternative, or even “non-spaces” (Aug
e 1992), was a way of compen-
sating for low budgets. Emerging designers would counterbalance low
investment in advertising by using the show to get publicity. In time,
however, a number of designers including those brands with much
greater financial security also began to adopt this model to define and
consolidate a strong visual identity as a way of standing out from the
8 Silvano Mendes

Figure 1
Heterochronia: Dior’s futuristic cubes anachronistically installed in the garden of the 18th century Rodin Museum in Paris (Couture SS 2015).
Picture by: Silvano Mendes.

competition in an over-crowded fashion week. Conversely, rather than

re-signifying existing urban spaces, other brands have invested in huge,
artificial interior sets that often resemble studio set designs for cinema.
One of the most emblematic instances is the house of Chanel, which,
in 2006, left its regular venue at the Carrousel du Louvre, an under-
ground mall by the entrance to the museum, for the Grand Palais, the
ornate exhibition site and museum complex off the Champs-Elys
ees. By
making full architectural use of the building’s imposing shell, the house
has staged a series of elaborate sets—often on the large scale of theatre
or film sets—to create a distinct imaginary world for each collection.
These have included a trompe l’oeil reconstruction of an airport interior
(S/S 2016), a giant globe (A/W 2013/14), wind turbines (S/S 2013), and
an iceberg especially imported from Scandinavia (A/W 2011/12), which
preceded Olafur Eiasson’s “Ice Watch” art installations in 2014. Each
time Chanel has managed to attract enormous publicity through the
striking sets and theatrical staging by promoting the dissemination of
images that showcase—often hyperbolically—the stylistic codes of the
house around the world. For the ready-to-wear A/W 2008–9 show, a
carousel was erected in the center of the stage, on which were embedded
the main “iconic” symbols of the house—the camellia brooch, pearl
necklace, quilted handbag and crisscross initial. Through its pastiche
aesthetic at the Grand Palais, Chanel has also consciously sought to
 Instagrammability of the Runway 9

underscore its specifically Parisian cultural provenance through sets that

have included a replica Eiffel tower (A/W 2017–18) and a political dem-
onstration (S/S 2015) inspired by May ’68 in a staged reproduction of a
traditional Parisian street complete with faux-Haussmann architecture.
This attempt to underline the links between the brand’s visual grammar
and the architecture of the city was most obvious in the S/S 2009 collec-
tion, the set for which recreated a mock-up of the façade of the emblem-
atic boutique on the rue Cambon.
Chanel’s staging of its visual codes through set design could also be
seen as a commercial translation of the concept of the “memory place”
articulated by the historian Pierre Nora (1989), in which the heritage of
the brand is inextricably linked to the iconographic history of Paris, and
in which the “spiritual home” of Chanel is elevated and manipulated
through promotional story-telling.2 The famous Chanel boutique is a
much-cited example. One might also mention the luxury jeweler
Cartier’s boutique on the rue de la Paix as an example of this type of
symbolic embodiment of the brand through the built environment that
either dominates the urban architecture of its surroundings or else figures
high in the cultural imaginary of luxury in literature and cinema—for
example, Tiffany’s boutique in New York, immortalized on screen in the
opening shots of Audrey Hepburn window shopping in Breakfast at
Tiffany’s (Edwards 1961).
These geographical moorings tend to refer back to the national or
regional origins of a label and are often centered on mythical fashion
cities, places with broad trans-cultural resonance for potential consum-
ers. Some design houses even add subtitles to their brand logo to high-
light their origins explicitly, like Hermes Paris or Prada Milano. In his
book on branded story-telling, Bruno Remaury (2004) argues that this
re-iteration of geographical provenance is often used by default and
without any precise meaning to attract a broad consumer audience
potentially lured by the symbolic capital of fashion cities within the col-
lective consciousness—“a reference,” he explains, “in the case of Paris,
which continues to work without fail, especially for faraway emerging
markets” (Remaury 2004, 30) (Figure 2). The symbolic value of Paris is
further evidenced by the success of books, guides, and Instagram
accounts that continue to cultivate the fantasy image of the fashionable
“Parisienne” figure. In the case of the runway shows, concentrating on
the house’s geographical origins is not the only way to create added
value for a fashion brand. Increasingly, in addition to the birthplace of
the house, other more exotic locations are used as fantasy projections
and mythological reference points.

Resort settings: fashion and starchitecture

This theoretical inquiry into luxury fashion’s spatial turn—into the cre-
ative synergies between the disciplines of fashion and architecture and
10 Silvano Mendes

more specifically into the ways in which design is “specialized” through

contemporary branding—can be extended through reference to the scen-
ography of the inter-seasonal “resort” (or “cruise”) collections, for
which luxury brands now compete to locate rare destinations to ensure
viral traction on social media. Resort collections were first developed in
the 1920s, when special collections were conceived for wealthy winter
sun-seekers. At present, the global mega-brands compete to find unex-
pected destinations to frame their collections. Besides the commercial
gain—resort sells well because it tend to contain more wearable and less
expensive products that stay in stores for longer—these inter-seasonal
offerings and their setting are also conceived as digital images to be
spread online. There are a number of recent examples that illustrate
how this century-old practice has re-routed designer fashion from fixed
seasonal to looser hybrid collections that are heavily promoted by the
press and circulate widely on social media. These collections are often
staged in places of obvious architectural or touristic interest—for
example, Dior’s 2016 collection by Raf Simons presented at the French
Riviera setting of the fantastical Palais Bulles (The Bubble Palace)
designed by the Hungarian architect Antti Lovag (Figure 3). Chanel’s
show the same year in Seoul was staged in a building designed by Zaha
Hadid, followed a year later by another show set in the streets of
Havana in Cuba, a further instance of the heterotopic use of space by
the fashion industry. Resort collections are often shown in May, which
is a downtime for the world’s fashion press (falling outside the fixed
annual timetable of A/W ready-to-wear shows in March, S/S shows in
September, and menswear and couture in January and June/July), and
such collections have secured a window of visibility in the context of
hyper-production and media presence—both on and off line—which
have been intensified by the economic impact of fast fashion on designer
ready-to-wear.
Theorists of both fashion and globalization have written about the
complex forms of cultural and geographical superimposition (Breward
and Gilbert 2006; Potvin 2009; Rocamora 2009, 2013; Str€ omberg
2019). For instance, the geographer Louise Crewe asks “how globaliza-
tion occurs in multiple and differentiated ways, working on and through
a series of overlaid scapes” (Crewe 2017, 5). The use of setting and set
design in fashion shows also heightens this sense of layered or superim-
posed space. In the framework of contemporary fashion, the term
“superimposed disciplines” would be more suitable since for the luxury
fashion houses such as Chanel, Dior or Vuitton the choice of place and
setting attests to their interest in architecture in creative synergy with
design. This phenomenon has replaced or completed their investment in
the visual arts as the central interdisciplinary paradigm, earlier instances
of which included collaborations between Japanese postmodern anime
artist Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton or between Sterling Ruby
and Raf Simons for the Dior Autumn/Winter 2014 menswear collection
 Instagrammability of the Runway 11

Figure 2
Inside the Dior’s futuristic cubes, the audience mediate the show through their mobile screens (Couture SS 2015). Picture by:
Silvano Mendes.
12 Silvano Mendes

Figure 3
The Palais Bulles (The Bubble Palace), designed by the Hungarian architect Antti Lovag, became the set for the Dior’s 2016 cruise
collection by Raf Simons. Picture by: Bureau Betak.

(Mendes and Rees-Roberts 2015). The more recent spatial turn in lux-
ury communications, which is articulated through scenography and top-
ography, bears witness to the emergence of another form of disciplinary
superimposition.
One of the most emblematic examples of the architectural turn in
contemporary luxury is that of global behemoth Louis Vuitton
(Gasparina 2009), a mega-brand that practices a modern version of
what Henri Lefebvre first termed “spatial appropriation”—which he
understood “as natural space modified in order to serve the needs and
possibilities of a group” (Lefebvre 1991, 165). However, this commer-
cial strategy can sometimes backfire. In full expansionist mode, Vuitton
built a giant trunk in the middle of Moscow’s Red Square, in 2013.
Intended as a symbol of brand dominance, the trunk measured some 9
meters high and 30 meters long and inadvertently obscured the view of
St Basil’s Cathedral, arousing such public hostility that the Kremlin
ordered its removal. Less controversially, the brand will more routinely
locate a famous architect-designed house or public building as a suitable
venue: the ready-to-wear show at Palm Springs in 2015 was held in the
 Instagrammability of the Runway 13

house of Bob and Dolores Hope. Vuitton then took buyers and press to
Rio de Janeiro in 2016 for a show outside the Niter
oi contemporary art
museum, a space-like structure designed by Oscar Niemeyer; and then
to Japan in 2017 to the Miho museum, an architectural project designed
by I. M. Pei, situated in the mountains around Kyoto. “Each designer
wants their own architect,” explains Romuald Leblond of the PR agency
La Mode en Images, the man behind the Vuitton show at Palm Springs
(Chayet 2015, 71). In this attempt to source a lesser-known but none-
theless photogenic location, Leblond explains, “either the brand has
recourse to a named architect, or else it needs to revive the work of for-
gotten architects for a new generation,” such as John Lautner, the over-
shadowed disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright and creator of the Hopes’
Palms Springs abode.
Leblond’s comments also draw attention to another strategy, which
is to collaborate with a famous architect, or “starchitect” as they are
popularly known (Ryan 2007; Gravari-Barbas and Renard-Delautre
2015; Berry 2018), who will create the staging and design the set. A
case in point is the collaboration between Rem Koolhaas and Prada,
cobranding that extended to the design and lay-out of the boutiques,
such as the Epicentre showroom in New York in 2001, as well as the
portable, shape-shifting cultural pavilion Transformer, which make its
first appearance in 2009, the Fondazione Prada in Milan inaugurated in
2018, and the scenography for several theatrical runway shows. Among
the most emblematic examples of collaborations on the runway between
the Italian house and the Dutch “starchitect” include the menswear A/
W 2013 collection “The Ideal House,” which comprised an interior
populated with geometric furniture conceived by the American-German
company Knoll; and the “Outdoor/Indoor/Outdoor, 2” (S/S 2015), for
which Koolhaas constructed huge purple dunes for the models to walk
around. For the Spring/Summer 2017 collection “Total Space,”
Koolhaas recycled the d
ecor from the previous season by erecting a
mesh ramp on the remnants of the set in a process described by the
architect as “layers of different architectures” (Carassai 2018).3 The col-
laboration between the fashion brand and architect also highlights the
role played by the luxury industry in the broader public promotion of
architecture, and the importance of scenography as a central component
of the imagery and discourse of today’s luxury brands.4

Digital settings: sharing the experience of fashion

Beyond the physical spaces of branded fashion —the runway shows,

boutiques, exhibitions in museums and foundations, ateliers and studios,
or corporate office spaces—it is also important to think about how such
spaces are consumed and experienced. According to the 2018 State of
Fashion report published by The Business of Fashion and McKinsey &
Company, “as consumer values coalesce around authenticity and
14 Silvano Mendes

individuality, brands will value data even more to tailor recommenda-

tions, engage influencers and personalize experiences” (Business of
Fashion and McKinsey & Company 2018, 44). Indeed, high-end fashion
and luxury businesses are increasingly replacing the traditional market-
ing mix of the four Ps (product, price, place and promotion) with the
four Es (experience, exchange, everyplace, evangelism). The idea of liv-
ing and sharing an experience of fashion and luxury is also inscribed in
the way in which we actively appropriate these spaces as consumers.
One illustration of this trend is how keen brands are to expose the
backstage of their production through media coverage about the ateliers
and factories, or carefully commissioned fashion films and independent
documentaries such as Dior and I (Tcheng 2014) or television series
such as The Day Before, Loïc Prigent’s behind-the-scenes look at the
fabrication of designer fashion (Rees-Roberts 2018). At times, these
productions are commissioned—or at least green-lit—by the brands and
such “content” gives an illusion of access to the exclusive world by
transmitting their stylistic codes and narrative or “mythological” fea-
tures of their patrimony.
In parallel, fashion designers have also integrated the same
“communicational continuum” (Jeanne-Perrier 2017, 26), which
involves looking for opportunities to talk about the brand beyond the
runway presentation and advertising campaigns. In this search for visi-
bility, showing the backstage of the design studios is a way of creating
an illusion of proximity to a formerly distant and elitist industry.
Historically, figures such as Crist
obal Balenciaga built their careers on a
sort of “mysterious incognito” (Ballard 2016, 170), which gave rise to
the myth of the elusive and hermetic designer, an attitude later adopted
by both Margiela and Helmut Lang. However, in the contemporary
digital context, designers are now encouraged to share their lives with
the brand’s online followers. Olivier Rousteing and Simon Porte
Jacquemus have both integrated the structure of advanced celebrity cul-
ture and routinely use digital social media to publicize themselves and
their lifestyles as much as their creative work (Paton 2017). While
Rousteing mixes images of his famous friends and acolytes with others
of his private life, Jacquemus accentuates the global image of his brand
through a Warholian gesture by consistently posting a series of three
identical stills of his own origins—of his family and locale in the south
of France—on Instagram. This same phenomenon of “sharing” imagery
online is also part of the digital communications strategy for the runway
show. An industry event, which was traditionally reserved for buyers,
clients, and journalists, has morphed into an experience that fashion
brands wish to share with consumers. While Thierry Mugler broke new
ground in the mid 1980s by selling tickets to the public for his stadium
show, in September 2015, Riccardo Tisci went further by organizing an
online lottery on social media, through which some eight hundred fans
were able to attend the Givenchy S/S 2016 show in New York, a trans-
 Instagrammability of the Runway 15

media event presented as a type of live art performance conceived by a

star of the medium, Marina Abramovic. Tisci therefore vulgarized the
fashion show even more by maximizing the visibility of the event and
by opening it up to a wider public.
This leads us to another heterotopic dimension of the runway show:
the question of access. “Heterotopias,” argued Foucault “always presup-
pose a system of opening and closing that isolates them and makes them
penetrable at the same time” (Foucault 1998, 183). Between spaces that
are entirely open or closed (such as the prison), Foucault also listed het-
erotopias that may appear open to some (“like pure and simple open-
ings”) but which also “generally conceal curious exclusions” (183). The
ritual of the fashion show (traditionally an invitation-only industry
event) makes it completely closed for some and open to others, without
ever completely revealing all the secrets of the brand. Visible on line, in
documentary films or in special PR events that give access to outsiders,
these practices are, in effect, simulacra of transparency, which only rein-
forces the dichotomy between distance and proximity that has always
structured the fashion and industries.
In her account of the impact of digital media on the fashion industry,
Val
erie Jeanne-Perrier argues that fashion is no longer defined solely as a
semiotic system of production and consumption, but also a whole system
of media representation governed by forms of digital performance
(Jeanne-Perrier 2017, 30). Sharing the experience of the fashion show
has therefore become a key part of branded communications strategy—
be it through the live event or digital media. This trend has accelerated
with the dominance of the online social media platform Instagram, the
square-image photo-sharing app first launched in 2010. Initially known
for its nostalgic filters, it has become, in less than a decade, the preferred
visual tool for branded fashion communications by driving engaged traf-
fic and allowing brands to interact directly with their consumer audience.
According to research with a focus on Asia, undertaken in November
2018 by Digimind, a social media monitoring platforms, “Instagram was
the king of engagement for luxury goods, accounting for 93% of total
interactions earned” (Digimind Report 2018). Marketing studies have
begun to emerge on the impact of Instagram for fashion brands (Correia
Loureiro and Moraes Sarmento 2019; Casal
o, Flavi
an and Ib
an~ ez-
S
anchez 2018). They emphasize the rate of engagement, brand visibility
and potential profit triggered by these new social media. Beyond brand
recognition measured in criteria such as followers, likes, shares and hash-
tags, posts also allow brands to obtain through data mining information
about potential consumers. “Luxury brands can attain consumer insights
to help stores plan purchasing and merchandising of stock based on the
items and colours of the images consumers share geographically,”
explains Stephen Dale (Digimind Report 2018).
Beyond the obvious technological advantages of mobile devices
equipped with advanced photo capacity and high-speed Internet
16 Silvano Mendes

connectivity, it is precisely the visual specificity of the app that suits the
image-driven industry of fashion by allowing brands to push imagery
beyond linguistic boundaries, to translate their promotional discourse
through an instantaneously global lens. As a communications tool,
Instagram has also transformed audiences into influential actors through
a movement that began with the rise of the fashion bloggers through the
2000s (Rocamora 2017). Images of the bloggers Garance Dor
e (Atelier
Dor
e), Bryan Gray Yambao (Bryan Boy), Tommy Ton (Jak&Gil) and
Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist) on the front row of the Dolce &
Gabbana show in September 2009 was a sign of things to come, inaugu-
rating the rise of the digital influencer as a key cultural and economic
player in contemporary fashion media. “With arms extended holding
overheating smartphones, the idea is to photograph, then tweet or insta-
gram the event faster than your neighbour,” reported Le Monde in
2013, in an article that addressed the transformation of the fashion
show by digital, an event broadcast and experienced in real time
through live posting and streaming (Bizet and Neuville 2013, 97). This
was also the moment when street style photography around the shows
was at its height. The influential fashion journalist Suzy Menkes pub-
lished an inflammatory op-ed in The New York Times bearing the title
“The Circus of Fashion” in which she bemoaned the intrusion of the
“peacocks” posing outside runway shows, some of which got more
media attention than the collections themselves. Not recognizing the dif-
ference between being stylish and showing off, these self-appointed mod-
els “are ready and willing to be objects” (Menkes 2013). Beyond the
potentially elitist and reactionary position espoused by Menkes, implicit
in her rant was the understanding that fashion brands had integrated
the impact of these hitherto unknown street-style celebrities into their
communications strategies—designer Marc Jacobs even named a hand-
bag in honor of the blogger Bryanboy.
Beyond the tension between journalists and influencers, Menkes’s cri-
tique of the industry nonetheless also raised another important point:
the media event itself began to take place off-stage. To avoid losing con-
trol of the narrative, designers and brands quickly began inviting a new
generation of millennial and post-millennial digital celebrities to their
shows and to embed them more strategically within their PR. These
influencers are present to promote the brand by going behind the scenes,
and to participate in product development through cobranding, collabo-
rations, and capsule collections. They have also had an impact on the
format of the contemporary fashion show by encouraging brands to
adapt it to the new digital framework. “The way we shoot it, the way
that we showcase it and the way that we make the clothes and design
them changed,” explains millennial designer Alexander Wang. “We try
to think of the pictures that are going to come out online, what the pho-
tographer pit takes versus what the audience sees” (Schneier 2014). His
A/W 2014 show in New York, for which the models posed static on
 Instagrammability of the Runway 17

platforms, was indeed made-to-measure for Instagram. To “create a

unique—and, by extension, shareable—experience for jaded show-goers
has become part of a designer’s mandate. Show are designed to wow
not only those in attendance, but also all of their followers” reported
The New York Times (Schneier 2014).
Agnes Rocamora has explained how fashion practices have adapted
to the media and have also been transformed by them. She observes that
fashion shows are mediatized events but, above all, they have become
“events produced and staged with a view to being consumed online, on
a digital screen ( … ) By being staged with a view to circulating online,
fashion show are increasingly becoming an instantiation of
‘mediatization’ as creation, and so of the transformative power of digital
media over fashion practices” (Rocamora 2017, 510). The impact of
digital on the fashion system has been felt on the conception, construc-
tion, promotion of the runway. The set designer and artistic director
Alexandre Betak, for example, has changed his method to adapt to
social media, especially Instagram. In 2013, he commented that the key
moments of the runway show, such as the beginning and the end of the
presentation, as well as the key presence of the model of the season,
were conceived to be legible on a short online video of fifteen seconds
maximum, adapted to Instagram, or six seconds on the (since defunct)
video platform Vine (Bizet and Neuville 2013, 97). Betak’s revised
approach to staging fashion for digital media has since intensified: from
2017 he began to “make the creative, visual and technical parts per-
fectly photographable and filmable from all angles” (Bosc 2017) giving
a clear view to all members of the audience allowing them to share a
flattering representation of the brand to their potential masses of
online followers.
The popular press has embedded “Instagrammability” into its dis-
course by including short articles intercut with Instagram posts on the
show, collection, backstage or scenography. These cross-media images
are produced and posted by the brands or by influencers, models or
guests, who attempt to capture the spectacular aspect of the event for
their online followers. The show’s Instagram moment, most often placed
at the end of the presentation, followed by moments when the public
can take photos of the set, has a specific aim: “to dispense with the sym-
bolic demarcation separating the stage from the audience, to exist on
social media” as journalist Alice Pfeiffer explains in an article published
in Le Monde on the A/W 2016–17 menswear shows aptly entitled “The
Finale of the Fashion Show: An Instagram Moment” (Pfeiffer 2016). At
shows by Paul Smith, Thom Browne, Kenzo and Ami, the models stayed
on the runway after the presentation to be photographed by the audi-
ence. The traditional finale is now extended through public interaction
with the aim of getting a unique and personalized shot for Instagram.
As Patrick Scallon, the director of communications for Dries Van Noten
explains, “even as the front row editors rush off to the next show, we
18 Silvano Mendes

like the idea that the other guests can stay, admire, approach and touch.
This restores a symbolic proximity and a material tactility that is miss-
ing from the fashion show” (Pfeiffer 2016). In terms of digital commu-
nications strategy, the Instagram moment is now as important as the
formal presentation of the collection, as a way for the brand to extend
the ephemeral event beyond the dissemination of “official” press images
through the vector of digital influencers, who act as intermediaries
between brand and consumer.
Scenography, then, has become a key part of the both the real and
digital conception of the live event, becoming the “locus of the perform-
ing subject” (Potvin 2009, 2), which facilitates the visual storytelling of
the collection—the way fashion is given narrative shape through live per-
formance. Sometimes the scale of the production design risks oversha-
dowing the collection itself. Through its recent shows staged at the
Grand Palais, Chanel has tended to make the scenography more spec-
tacular than the designs themselves. Following its installation of an art
gallery, for the A/W 2014–15 show, the brand reproduced a supermar-
ket. The models walked down the supermarket aisles filled with everyday
products that were re-branded Chanel, or packaged with puns referenc-
ing the founder of the house, Coco Chanel—a vein of ironic humor that
was part of Karl Lagerfeld’s signature through his long tenure from 1982
to 2019. He explained the metaphor of the supermarket as a reflection
of the everyday in luxury, and the striking use of saturated colors and
serial repetition of articles of mass consumption self-consciously gestured
to the cultural legacy of Andy Warhol and pop art, a history intertwined
with Lagerfeld’s own personal trajectory and public persona (Drake
2006, 102–106; Rees-Roberts 2018, 146–148). The press responded
positively to Lagerfeld’s pop spectacle of consumerism with fashion edi-
tors caught off-guard posing “with shopping trolleys amid this
Warholian fashion extravaganza, before models posed as shoppers, strol-
ling around the superstore in a choreographed performance” (Fox 2014).
Blogger Garance Dor
e, a self-declared outsider turned professional
expert, whose blog has since morphed into an autonomous studio, com-
mented that if “fashion shows are a communication event then this one
must have exploded any standard” (Dor
e 2014). With characteristic
irony she notes the information that matters most in the digital age of
social media influence. “The number of tweets and Instagrams went liter-
ally crazy. Chanel Explosion: N 128616” (Dor
e 2014). “The server at
Grand Palais may well have gone into some kind of cardiac arrest from
such feverish instagramming,” added the British Vogue (Harris 2014).
Indeed, the show was one of the most photographed events of Paris
Fashion Week, in which the designs were almost eclipsed by the huge-
scale production of the show itself, transformed from a fashion presenta-
tion into a branding operation. “Ok, I don’t really see the clothes so
much, I’m so fascinated by the decor,” (Dor
e 2014) Dor
e admitted in
line with other assembled journalists and influencers.
 Instagrammability of the Runway 19

The spectacle of digital influence

As cultural critic Greil Marcus observes in relation to the extravagance

of the fashion shows of the 1980s and 1990s, the risk of the consumer
spectacle obscuring the product is a not a recent problem. Drawing on
philosopher Guy Debord’s seminal critique of the society of the spec-
tacle, Marcus argued how “spectacle had become a fashionable critical
commonplace by the early 1980s. It was a vague term, devoid of ideas.
It simply meant that the image of a thing superseded the thing itself”
(Marcus quoted in Breward 1995, 227). In the context of fashion his-
tory, Caroline Evans has also transposed Debord’s framework to the
display of more avant-garde designs from the 1990s (Evans 2003) con-
ceived as a form of critical engagement with the notion of a society of
spectacle in full transformation. Evans further describes how “new
media and increased fashion coverage made previously elite fashion
accessible to a mass audience, but only as image, never as object,”
(Evans 2000, 97)—a revealing foresight into the future course of the
fashion digital image in the early twenty-first century, when the prolifer-
ation of screen interfaces and practices of ecommerce constantly blur
the boundaries between material object and digital image. Indeed, as
Bruno Remaury observes, in the pre-digital historical context, ever since
the reproduction of the image through photography, and later through
film, what we are witnessing is a disembodiment of the object. As the
dematerialization of information has transformed the image into a con-
sumer product, the next stage in this paradoxical reversal of roles is that
“the object becomes an image and the image in turn becomes an object”
(Remaury 2004, 113). Such an argument is echoed in the dissemination
of contemporary fashion imagery through digital platforms such as
Instagram, in which shared posts have a direct market value—they can
be purchased—and an indirect one as the online symbols of brand influ-
ence, to such an extent that some brands even flaunt their number of
followers as much as their financial turnover.
This process of disembodiment of the fashion object is linked to the
broader demystification of the designer industry as a whole. For long,
the socio-professional function of the fashion show was to mark out the
exclusivity and elitism of the industry milieu; it was purposefully
designed as a practice that was “singular and impossible to reproduce”
(Betak and Singer 2017, 10). Clearly, in the contemporary world of the
designer-branded fashion show, an illusion of transparency and accessi-
bility is key to its commercial viability. The digital reproduction of run-
way imagery—professional and amateur, official and unofficial, still and
moving—means that the “aura” of the fashion show has disappeared
(Benjamin 2008). Today’s shows are seen through the multiple prisms
of diverse image-makers from professional photographers to digital
influencers and attendant fans, many of whom no longer watch the
presentation directly but rather mediate it through their mobile screens
20 Silvano Mendes

as they simultaneously capture or stream the collection—a further illus-

tration of how digital screens have radically reconfigured everyday social
interaction (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2007). This also confirms the con-
temporary conjuncture of fashion object and digital image as bound up
in what The Business of Fashion has called “the age of influence”
(Young 2018, 22–27). Most fashion designers and brands accept that
guests—be they buyers, journalists, or influencers—continue to play a
prescriptive role as cultural intermediaries in how they “guide and dic-
tate to others in matters of style and taste” (Edwards 2012, 9). As
Agnes Rocamora reminds us, since the emergence of fashion blogs and
social media apps, “the geography of fashion has been decentered but
so has the geography of fashion tastemakers” (Rocamora 2013, 159).
Just as the fate of fashion cities as “global tastemakers” (Currid 2007,
157) ebbs and flows, so too the function and prestige of traditional
experts varies over time and adapts to technological change. The appar-
ent scorn in Menkes’s critique of the “circus of fashion” is in part due
to the waning influence of the professional critic, who now rubs should-
ers with influencers, whose possible lack of cultural capital is counter-
balanced by their quantitative digital impact through likes, shares, and
reposts. In a post-media context in which brands have also, in effect,
themselves become media (Patrin-Leclere, Marti de Montety and
Berthelot-Guiet 2014), with fashion houses morphing into production
studios that create their own discourse through the multiple forms of
branded content, consumers too operate as media by generating and dis-
seminating images through a flexible and fast-changing digital language
and by navigating between forms of traditional critique and newer
experiential and narrative formats such as Instagram Stories.
In his fourth thesis, Debord postulated the spectacle as not simply an
aggregate of images but rather “a social relationship between people
that is mediated by images” (Debord 1992 [1967]: 16). In the trans-
media landscape of “spreadable” media, where texts and images are
conceived and circulated by audiences of fans and consumers (Jenkins,
Ford and Green 2013), fashion brands rely on digital influencers to
actively produce still and moving images of the runway that will either
aesthetically valorize the collection or simply enhance the brand. To
produce a spreadable fashion image that will stand out, a like, share, or
repost, will depend on its aesthetic appeal. An instagrammer will look
to mediate a differential image, one with an original point of view and
one that will be enhanced by an enticing setting or dramatic backdrop –
from the impressive Chanel settings to the arty Danish designer Henrik
Vibskov shows (Figure 4). Image directors, PRs, set designers, and
events producers have all integrated this insight into their practice by
making fashion shows social media friendly from a visual as well as
from a social perspective, and making them spreadable by adapting the
d
ecor to fit social media diffusion—with the scenography now intended
in part as a backdrop for selfies and other types of self-performance.
 Instagrammability of the Runway 21

Figure 4
The arty Danish designer Henrik Vibskov transformed several scenographies of his shows in backdrop for selfies (PFW/FW 2019). Picture
by: Silvano Mendes.

Conclusion: beyond fashion

The artistic dimension to the work of contemporary fashion designers

and image-makers is an important part of branded communications
strategy, which includes the fashion show—now staged in a digital con-
text that increasingly imposes the framework (the forms and rhythms)
in which images are formatted and spread across media platforms.
Today’s fashion show does not simply present a collection of clothes
against a background set design; it uses scenography more instrumen-
tally as the setting for brands and influencers to capture still and moving
images of fashion for followers of online social media. As John Potvin
explains in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, “architectural and spatial
structures are transformed by fashionable embodied agents who forever
participate in the never-ending spectacle and performances of modernity
as both agents and spectators” (Potvin 2009, 3). This need to re-assess
the creative synergies between fashion and architecture is reinforced by
the impact of digital on the different environments of design and
22 Silvano Mendes

Figure 5
With a show against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, Saint Laurent provided a setting made-to-measure for Instagram (S/S 2019).
Picture by: Bureau Betak/Daniel Salemi.

communications. The house of Saint Laurent has fully embraced this

idea. Following the S/S 2018 show in front of the Eiffel Tower, in a
powerful attempt to export Paris to the world, in June 2018, the brand
chose the Liberty State Park on the banks of the Hudson river in NY as
the setting for its S/S 2019 show. Like a metaphorical remake of Fendi’s
2007 show at the Great Wall of China, here replaced by Wall Street,
the brand repositioned itself once again in the US, a consumer market
that has been revitalized following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.
One account of this show in French Vogue explained that the “house of
Saint Laurent moved Planet Fashion to New Jersey” (Le d
efil
e Saint
Laurent homme face a Manhattan 2018) to show off the collection
against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline and to provide a setting
that was made-to-measure for Instagram (Figure 5). This is the key to
understanding the conception of set design for today’s fashion show: the
setting is now a “grammable” space; it is at once real and virtual. The
fashion show, then, is an effective communications tool for the contem-
porary brand not only because it consolidates the aura of the house; it
also feeds into the brand’s discourse from media advertising to retail
design. Conceiving the fashion show as a branding tool might not be
 Instagrammability of the Runway 23

new, but this type of communication has been radically transformed

and rejuvenated by online social media. The search for ideal, digital-
friendly locations shows how designer brands are now re-configuring
the fashion show to maximize online visibility—a clear strategy of
“spectacularisation” that gives them added value by enriching their art-
istic and cultural aspirations beyond fashion.
Translated from the French by Nick Rees-Roberts.

Notes

1. Defined in opposition to utopia, the notion of heterotopia was

first developed by Foucault in a lecture (for the Cercle d’Etudes
architecturales de Paris) on space given in 1967, in which the
philosopher outlined the criteria and principles of heterotopias as
spaces with the ability “to juxtapose in a single real place several
emplacements that are incompatible in themselves”
2. Caroline Evans first drew on Nora’s concept of ‘memory places’ in
the context of her history of the material traces of the first couture
houses (Evans 2013, 139–140).
3. This technique of recycling the set design is reminiscent of Martin
Margiela’s second show in 1989, for which the first model wore a
white cotton vest made from material covered in footprints from
the runway of his previous show, where the models’ shoes were
dipped in fresh paint (Samson and Saillard 2018: 14). As Jill
Gasparina remarks, Margiela’s gesture takes us back to the artistic
performances of Yves Klein at the end of the 1950S, when the
artist used the bodies of his naked female models as paint brushes
(Gasparina 2006, 42). While Klein transformed a live performance
into a still painting, Margiela transformed the set into a garment.
4. This branded investment in space design is also popular with the
fashion press, which publishes an ever-greater number of articles
on the subject of runway scenography rather than focussing
uniquely on the designs themselves. See, for example,
“L’incroyable set du d
efil
e Givenchy haute couture printemps-
et
e
2019” (Rogers 2019), “Les plus beaux d
ecors de d
efil
es femme
printemps-
et
e 2019” (Gu
enon des Mesnards 2018), or “Fashion
Week Set Design: Three Top Designers Reveal Their Inspiration”
(Ilyashov 2019).

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