Eight statement show spaces from Paris Fashion Week
Clinical, stripped-back show spaces made appearances at Miu Miu and Courrèges, while Off-White and Dior opted for more extravagant sets for their Autumn Winter 2023 collections at Paris Fashion Week.
Paris Fashion Week took place from 27 February to 7 March and was the final fashion event of the Autumn Winter 2023 womenswear season.
This season saw brands largely return to using paired-back catwalks as settings for their show spaces, as evidenced in shows from Loewe, Miu Miu, Courrèges and Marie Adam-Leenaerdt.
Other fashion houses, including Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton, used and referenced more opulent and decorative settings, presenting their shows in historic museums and in spaces that replicated motifs from grand ballrooms.
Off-White
Off-White, a fashion brand founded by the late designer Virgil Abloh, staged its Autumn Winter 2023 show at the Tennis Club de Paris – a tennis club in Paris' Porte de Saint-Cloud neighbourhood that was founded in 1897.
The interior of the tennis club was transformed by French production company Bureau Betak into a lunar setting with a giant mirrored sphere that had crashlanded at the centre of the space. Reddish dust covered the floor of the club, with meteor-like rocks scattered across its surface between two rows of cubic seating.
Courrèges
A clinical white show space, lit by a large overhead light box, was filled with smoke from grates in the floor for Courréges' Autumn Winter 2023 womenswear show. It was conceived by French creative studio Matière Noire and set designer and artist Rémy Briere who transformed the library of Sorbonne University into an arena-style space.
"This dreamy runway space was designed by artist Rémy Brière in collaboration with Matière Noire – a collective known for its ability to craft the immaterial into interactive objects of technical wonder," said Courrèges in its show notes.
"This season again, a taming of natural forces – of light, fog, air – perpetuates a surreal, almost dystopian, vision of nature which mirrors the spiritual evolutions of di Felice's visual narrative."
Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos collaborated with Dior to produce a 24-metre-long, one-tonne installation that was decorated with 20 different fabrics from the collection. The installation, titled Valkyrie Miss Dior and made completely by hand, had an organic form comprised of fabric, lace, and crochet.
It was created for Dior's Autumn Winter 2023 womenswear show, which took place during Paris Fashion Week on 28 February. The Valkyrie Miss Dior installation was inserted within a purpose-built structure in the Jardin des Tuileries.
Saint Laurent
In reference to Yves Saint Laurent's couture collections, Saint Laurent's creative director Anthony Vaccarello recreated elements of the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris – where the brand would stage its haute couture collections between 1975 and 2001.
The show took place within a purpose-built structure that boasted a contemporary black-box look from the exterior, while the inside was decorated with an opulent sentiment.
A series of large bronze chandeliers were suspended above a golden-carpeted runway that was endlessly reflected by mirrored screens at various points across the show space.
Miu Miu
Titled Ways of Looking, the show took place inside the Palais d'Iéna – an art deco structure in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The collection and show were centred around the idea of looking, seeing and observing, and how these acts can alter the perception of an object of focus.
The interior of the Palais bared an industrial, stripped-back set and was fitted with an elevated walkway, which the brand explained helped to "aid our observation."
Screens were suspended from box trusses across the ceiling, which played installation works by South Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong who uses her body and animatronics to examine relationships between the human body and cloning.
Louis Vuitton
French artist Philippe Parreno and American production designer James Chinlund inserted an installation of a Parisian street into the highly ornate salons of the Musée d'Orsay for Louis Vuitton's Autumn Winter 2023 collection.
The set replicated the rain-soaked cobbles of Parisian streets and was paired with a soundscape of city sounds that included stone-clicking footsteps, cars and dogs, created by composer and sound engineer Nicolas Becker.
The runway-cum-installation starkly contrasted against the golden and rich interiors of the salons of the Musée d'Orsay with its dark, black finishes paired with bright white lighting and spiky panelling.
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt
Belgian fashion designer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt presented her first collection during Paris Fashion Week inside the Crowne Plaza Paris on the Place de la Republique. The show occurred in one of the hotel's conference rooms and was overhauled by French special events company Villa Eugénie.
Villa Eugénie filled the space with conference chairs that were stacked and piled at the centre of the room, around pillars and in doorways in various positions and formations.
The chairs were also used as audience seating. Much like the set, when creating the collection Adam-Leenaerdt looked to everyday objects to subvert their use and translate them into clothes.
Loewe
Approximately ten tonnes of brightly coloured confetti were compressed into large cubes at Loewe's Autumn Winter 2023 show, which took place at the Esplanade du Château de Vincennes during Paris Fashion Week.
Much like the Spanish fashion house's previous shows, the setting was a white box space with tiered seating. The space was dotted with 25 cubic forms of confetti by Italian artist Lara Favaretto that measured nearly one metre in height.
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