How Bureau Betak transformed the runway show: ‘Our currency is emotion and memory’

Amid the heady hedonism of the 1990s, fashion shows transcended from industry showcases to cultural touchstones. Designers became celebrities. Models became super. Fashion houses became global luxury brands. The fashion show, catapulted into mainstream culture thanks to the rapid advance of technology, was a powerful catalyst for image creation and dissemination. Against this backdrop, Alexandre de Betak founded his Paris-based production company Bureau Betak. Over three decades, he revolutionised the very concept of fashion communication.

Alexandre de Betak stepped away from Bureau Betak three years ago. The company is now co-helmed by Bénédicte Fournier Beckmann, Paco Raynal and Guillaume Troncy, and it’s very much business as usual (in so far as this business is ever quotidian).

How Bureau Betak transformed the runway show

‘We work as a collective with strong creative and production teams everywhere, made stronger by our shared experience,’ says Fournier Beckmann. For our interview, it’s fitting that the trio are beamed by a screen from their Parisian offices. A fashion show today is experienced live by a 1,000-or-so people, but it is devoured by millions virtually, via a plethora of media platforms and posts.

Today, Bureau Betak employs around 100 people across four offices in Paris, New York, LA and Shanghai. It is best known for the production of fashion shows for some of the world’s biggest brands, but its creative tentacles are far-reaching across events of all shapes and sizes, from brand activations and parties to exhibitions and keynote speeches. ‘We are like the fairies in the background,’ says Troncy. ‘We make ideas happen.’

It’s a modest statement because Bureau Betak is actually a meticulously skilled outfit that understands how all aspects of its involvement connect: first imagining, then creating and communicating the codes of a house, its designer and their collection. The volume of its productions has mushroomed. ‘When we started,’ says Fournier Beckmann (who, together with Raynal, has been at Bureau Betak since its infancy), ‘we would do four shows a year for a brand; now we do between eight and 12 a year – and they only get bigger.’ Until relatively recently, this was called fashion show production. Today, this is more like conducting the orchestra for a single track in the canon of a brand, and ensuring that it plays out pitch-perfectly to a febrile, global audience, first live and then in ripples that continue until the next show drops.

‘Our job does not stop at delivering a set,’ Troncy says. ‘In many ways, it’s just the start. The live event is when the magic happens and what will travel the world.’ A show must be impactful and memorable for its physical audience and professional photographer bank, but it must also translate effortlessly on to the phone cameras of everyone in attendance, too. Beyond the ‘owned assets’, this is how the majority of people see a collection for the first time nowadays. ‘We’ve been looking at our sets through our own camera phones for about 15 years,’ Fournier Beckmann says. ‘The feeling, the lighting, the staging – everything must look as good as possible from any angle. A show goes worldwide in five seconds.’

At the A/W 2025 shows earlier this year, the team transported us (metaphorically) to a louche weekend at an English country house for Burberry; through the dawn of time with artist Robert Wilson for Dior; into a maze of glossy red bathroom cubicles for Valentino; and inside a glowing onyx monolith for Saint Laurent. ‘The scale and speed may have changed, but the way we work is very similar to how we’ve always worked,’ Raynal explains. ‘We begin in conversation with the client and from this we interpret a brief. It is not always a precise one. It could be a single word, a picture, a conversation. We then present our vision of the interpretation of their brief to the client. Once we get approval for the vision, we work out how to achieve it. We are careful to work within an allocated budget. Every bit as important as the show itself, is what happens after the event – not just to the brand assets, but to the physical elements too. We take the eco-responsibility of our projects very seriously.’

Operating at the sharper edge of an industry not celebrated for its sustainability credentials, Bureau Betak has been a pioneer. In 2020, it was the first production agency to be awarded 20121 certification for sustainable event management. Better Betak launched in 2022 as an open platform for recording observations, sharing solutions and identifying commitments towards more sustainable event management within the luxury sector. It is an impressive core of the company’s mission rather than a green-tinged add-on, and is clearly heartfelt by the trio, who wax lyrical about ever-better practices being a key ingredient to their success.

Ultimately, though, they agree that certain primal, human qualities are what define their practice and reputation. ‘We are dealing with human relationships essentially: emotion, trust, support, passion and memory,’ Troncy says. Raynal adds, ‘Our currency is emotion and memory. These can never be delivered by a computer. A render might look beautiful, but it feels soulless – the emotional connection is absent. We believe wholeheartedly in the power of human creativity.’ That vital trust between brand and agency is hard-earned, not just by staging shows smoothly, but by creating magic. Troncy describes the feeling of Alessandro Michele’s S/S 2023 show for Gucci, where 68 pairs of identical twins were flown in to model. A wall divided the identically dressed twins for the show, and was only raised at the end when the twins took each other’s hands for the finale. ‘At first, there was a gasp and then the entire room was crying,’ says Troncy. ‘AI could never do this.’

Indeed, Raynal points out that event production is not simply confined to fashion, but is a fundamental part of humanity: we are, by our very nature, show-offs. ‘This job will exist forever,’ he says. ‘The need for ceremony and events is part of any empire, from the Egyptians to the Romans to Louis XIV – bringing people together to celebrate is a nothing new, it is part of life. Tools change and context evolves, but the need to stir emotion and create a memory [that] endures.’

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

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