When The Weeknd brings After Hours Til Dawn to Wembley Stadium for five nights from 14 August, London will receive the latest version of a tour world that has been mutating since 2022. Under Swedish-Greek artist and scenographer Alexander Wessely, its post-apocalyptic cityscape has become a four-act architecture of collapse: a stadium-scale world where physical set, LED wall, light and smoke form a city that ages, fractures and outlives its performer.

‘The first city was still standing. This one is falling apart while you watch it,’ Wessely tells Wallpaper*. ‘The fracture isn’t a look, it’s the story told through the architecture itself.’ The image that unlocked this version was not a skyline, a screen treatment or a piece of pop iconography, but Abel Tesfaye rising from ash in darkness, caught in slow strobes, ‘coming up out of nothing’. From there, Wessely began thinking in ruins, classical fragments and archaeological remains – broken things with greater presence than complete ones. The stadium becomes an excavated future: sacred, abandoned and, as he puts it, ‘closer to a cathedral than a stage’.

Light is central to Wessely’s vernacular. His route into scenography passed through photography, and he still treats light as a way of giving objects physical consequence, not just visibility. ‘The screen builds images, but light builds mass,’ he says. ‘It’s what gives the real objects on that stage their weight and their volume, what makes them feel like something you could touch rather than something projected.’ Nothing here is lit flat. Every beam, shadow and surface is shaped so the physical world can hold its own against the scale of the screen.

Across the show’s chapters, the set and LED wall are made to blur until the seam disappears. The screen becomes the city continuing past the limits of steel, light and stage engineering. At its centre sits Hajime Sorayama’s patinated steel figure – chrome body, machine idol, relic from a civilisation that, as Wessely says, ‘mistook the machine for a god’.

Ahead of The Weeknd’s Wembley dates, Wallpaper* spoke to Wessely about designing collapse at stadium scale, making light behave like architecture, and giving an artist’s private descent a city the audience can stand inside.

Alexander Wessely on his apocalyptic set design for The Weeknd

Wallpaper*: After Hours Til Dawn began in 2022 with a post-apocalyptic cityscape. This latest chapter feels darker and more fractured. How has the set evolved since that first iteration, and did it need to age with the trilogy?

Alexander Wessely: This is a trilogy about a man losing himself, so the world can’t stay the same from start to finish; it has to carry the same damage he does. The set ages the way he ages. It starts whole, and it ends in ash. That’s more or less the whole idea. The fracture isn’t a look; it’s the story told through the architecture itself.

W*: How does the creative conversation work between you, Abel and La Mar Taylor?

AW: La Mar co-founded XO with Abel and has been his creative director from the very beginning, so he’s shaped this world alongside him for years. He’s the show director across all of this, and this was our first full-on collaboration, a real dialogue rather than a handoff. La Mar and I have gotten closer ever since the Coachella headline show we did in 2022, working together more and more. A lot of the show comes from Abel himself, real things from the past couple of years, fighting his demons in very personal ways. He sets the emotional truth of it, and we build the world that holds it. The best moments are the ones none of us could have reached alone. My job is to give the feeling an architecture, to turn what he’s living through into a space you can stand inside.

W*: Were there any key architectural decisions that shaped how the audience experiences the show?

AW: Scale, and where you put the human inside it. Everything was built so you feel the size of the world before you find the man in it. We used set extensions so the physical architecture keeps going past what your eye can actually verify, and at some point the stadium itself starts to feel like part of the ruin.

W*: What are the visual cues that distinguish each chapter of the tour – colour, pace, light, atmosphere – and how do they guide the audience through the story?

AW: Each chapter has its own state of collapse and its own temperature. The peak is gold, monumental, slow, worship at its highest. The middle fractures, colder, faster, the image breaking apart. The end strips it all back to a single figure in near silence. The colour and the pace carry the descent, so you never have to tell the audience where they are in the story. They feel the fall in the light before they’d ever read it.

W*: Where does the physical set end and the digital world begin? Is the LED wall a surface, a horizon, or a second stage? What can the screen say that the physical stagecraft cannot?

AW: The whole point is you shouldn’t be able to tell. That’s what excites me, that blur between what’s real and what’s not, practical or digital. It’s the same thing I chased at Sphere Las Vegas. The physical set is built to bleed into the screen, so the seam disappears and you lose the horizon. The wall isn’t a backdrop; it’s the world continuing past what you can actually build. What the screen does, that steel and light can’t, is change scale in a second. It can turn Abel into a giant and then into dust before you’ve caught up. The physical stuff gives you weight and truth. The screen gives you transformation. You need both, or the fall doesn’t feel real.

W*: The show is built around a vast urban landscape in collapse. How do you design a city that is meant to fall apart?

AW: You build it in stages. The city moves through different states of ruin across the night, so the audience isn’t looking at a collapse; they’re moving through one. The important part is that it has to start from something big enough that losing it matters. If the city didn’t feel monumental first, watching it come apart wouldn’t do anything. So a lot of the work early on was making it feel solid and real, so that when it starts breaking down later you actually feel the loss of it.

W*: How did you think about Abel’s body against that scale? Is he swallowed by the world, directing it, or surviving it?

AW: All three, and in that order. He starts vast, a giant at the peak of his own worship, gold, untouchable. Then the world turns on him, and he glitches, damaged, not in control of his own image anymore. And, by the end, he’s back to human scale, one to one, and then he’s gone. That arc of his body against the architecture is the whole story for me. He’s worshipped, then swallowed, then reduced to just a man, and the world outlives him.

W*: How closely do the lighting, effects and screen environments respond to the music? Are there any songs that demanded their own visual world outside the wider narrative?

AW: The whole environment is scored to the music; it breathes with it instead of sitting behind it, and, in some moments, breaks out of the wider story completely and demands its own world. A show this long needs moments that stop the narrative and hold you somewhere else for a minute before the fall keeps going. Abel’s catalogue makes that easy in one way and brutal in another, because the music already tells his life, so you’re working visually against ten years of that. It’s tough competition, honestly.

W*: Hajime Sorayama’s sculpture is central to the tour’s visual identity. It feels futuristic, weathered, erotic and almost archaeological. How important was that tension between machine, relic and body?

AW: That tension is the whole thing. Sorayama’s work sits exactly where mine does, between the machine and the body, the future and the ruin. His sculpture reads as something worshipped or dug up, a relic from a civilisation that mistook the machine for a god. I met him in Tokyo, and the language was immediate; we’re both circling the same question: what does the human worship when it doesn’t know what it believes anymore? The chrome body at the centre of the show is that question, made monumental.

alexanderwessely.com

‘How do you design something that holds the space, as well as allowing for a fluidity and pace of storytelling?’ asks designer Rae Smith, who has considered the question upon the return of War Horse to the National Theatre in London (until 30 July 2026).

Smith, who has overseen the drawings, costume and set design for the play, won the Tony for Best Scenic Design of a Play in 2011 and sees the show’s return to the stage as a chance to rework the finer details. ‘Every couple of years we come back to the show to make it better and better, because we all love it,’ she says.

Michael Morpurgo’s novel, on which the play is based, follows a horse, Joey, who is shipped to France to be part of the cavalry in the First World War. The play originally premiered at the National Theatre in 2007, transferring to the West End in 2009, where it remained until 2016. It has toured globally since, now returning to its first home on the fan-shaped Olivier stage in the brutalist enclave of the National Theatre.

Joey the horse, controlled by three puppeteers from the Handspring Puppet Company, commands the stage, the centre of a design left purposely clean to allow for Joey’s ‘living, breathing’ idiosyncrasies. ‘It's not so much a set, it's more an environment,’ Smith says. ‘It captures all of the players in it, and the context is so fast you don’t need a piece of scenery every 30 seconds. The Olivier is a great space for storytelling, where someone can stand on stage and address a large audience quite intimately, and consequently the audience can see them in detail quite intimately as well.’

Smith uses screens to express the all-encompassing nature of the First World War, with her drawings acting as a scenic backdrop, or a way of enhancing battles on stage. There was always the intention for the screen to be used for shadow puppets, with some of the background stories playing out in shadow. ‘What was important was the idea that we were telling our great-grandfathers’ stories, because it came very much from the heart,’ Smith says. ‘It is like I am a visual diarist all the way through, and consequently my diary style went from quite sedate landscapes, countryside loveliness, to more expressionist and full of charcoal and foreboding as [the characters] hit France.’

As the characters go into battle, the drawings become almost vorticist in style, the landscapes dissolving into abstraction as the social order is obliterated. The sense of terror is shaped by the art and the dual purpose of the screens. ‘When we talked about the initial idea of the screen with animated shadow silhouettes, we discovered that the shadow puppets were so full of adrenaline that they were shaky when projected up to four or five times the size.’ Smith built on this emotion, also creating a tank that was like a shadow puppet.

‘I handed that over so that its movement would be exaggerated by animators, so you could have a tank followed by a whole collective of tanks, coming over the hills towards the horses.’ Through this intertwining of mediums, the battle comes to life. ‘When the tank spins round, we get the shadowing into animations as well, to give the sense of the mortal excitement for the end – the feelings of the battlefield, basically.’

War Horse is at the National Theatre until 30 July 2026, nationaltheatre.org.uk

A deep bond becomes otherworldly in the new A24 film Mother Mary. The psychodrama, directed by David Lowery, follows global pop icon Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) who reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). When Mother Mary asks Sam to make her a dress for an unforgettable performance, the pair embark on an intense evening of confrontation and reinvention in Sam’s somber workspace, set in a dark barn on an estate somewhere in the English countryside.

In real life, the barn is located not in the UK, but in Germany at a moated castle called Burg Adendorf. The structure became not only a leading character in the film but also a critical cinematic device for UK-based production designer Francesca Di Mottola. ‘The stable is a container where the story unfolds and where the emotions are held,’ says Di Mottola, whose credits include films like the Charli xcx satire The Moment and Luca Guadagnino’s I am Love.

With a soaring 14m-tall ceiling and ample open space, the barn performs like a stage for a revealing dance and séance scenes in the film. To make the centuries-old structure feel more claustrophobic and moody, the design team covered some lighter-toned walls in canvas, divided the room into zones and added an upper-level loft. Drained of colour, the barn offers a neutral atmosphere for vivid fabrics to pop as Sam crafts a garment for Mother Mary. Mannequins wear garments in subdued hues to underscore the effect. ‘They move during the scenes and close in on them,’ says Di Mottola of the mannequins, which represent the haunting recollections Sam holds in her work. ‘It's meant to be imperceptible.’

The barn is just one setting in Mother Mary but its elements act as ‘connecting tissue’ uniting past and present throughout the plot. In Mother Mary’s concert scenes, which were filmed at an arena and on a soundstage, the barn’s rustic wood beams are echoed through lighting design onstage and in a 360-degree mirrored dressing room. For a backstage scene, Di Mottola recreated the wood beams as the backdrop for Mother Mary’s journey to her first séance (led by singer FKA Twigs) in a hotel room. The design team laid the same wood plank flooring they put over the barn’s dirt ground in front of the hotel room set to connect the two thematically.

The barn served practical purposes for the design team, too; Some sets were built inside of it, including Sam’s bedroom where she first encounters the supernatural (the exteriors of the home were filmed at a different German castle called Burg Müddersheim).

To get the details just right, Di Mottola's team intensely studied Sam and Mother Mary's notable real-life counterparts. In fashion, that meant examining the workspaces of Valentino Garavani, John Galliano, and Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli through documentaries and short films. In music, that meant analysing stadium-tour footage of Taylor Swift, Madonna, Dua Lipa, Lady Gaga and more. The stage design also needed to complement original songs written by Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs. But, after so much research, says Di Mottola, 'we did our own thing.’

Casting away these influences resulted in an atelier that felt real but true to Sam, and simple stage designs that let Mother Mary shine. ‘Despite us being very inspired by huge artists, we then needed to find our artists,’ says Di Mottola. And so they did.

Mother Mary is on limited release in the US from 17 April 2026. It’s nationwide and in UK cinemas from 24 April 2026.

The thrill of the Oscars is seeing which nominees will take home those Midas-touched statuettes. But in creating the stage for the 98th Academy Awards, production designers Misty Buckley and Alana Billingsley wanted to capture a different kind of gold – golden hour.

For the 2026 Oscar stage design, the duo transformed Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre into a light-dappled secret garden, complete with leafy trees, bronze trellis-like gates and dynamic, LED panels that glow with sunset hues. It’s a scheme that’s both organic and glamorous.

‘This year we really thought about the set as a sanctuary for celebration,’ Buckley and Billingsley told Wallpaper* in an email. ‘The space feels ceremonial, almost like stepping into a courtyard designed for reflection. There is always the sense of something just beyond these walls that makes the gathering feel all the more intimate.’

To create that feeling of intimacy – a challenge that’s two-fold, given the live audience and millions of TV viewers – Buckley and Billingsley leveraged the architecture of the stage, beginning with a diamond-shaped proscenium that draws the eye deeper into the scenography. The stage is then framed with scenic elements, including Japanese maples and glowing rice paper-like panels that reconfigure to highlight what’s happening, from awards to tributes to musical performances. The screens also project videos and animations, including images of golden light filtering through leaves. ‘It creates this subtle sense that the space is breathing,’ the designers explained.

Buckley, who most recently designed the stage for the BRIT Awards, and Billingsley, an art director whose work includes the Grammy’s stage, are no strangers to the Academy Awards. In fact, this year’s ceremony is the duo’s fourth time designing the Oscars’ sets. Still, it’s a tall order: ‘You’re constantly thinking about camera angles, lighting conditions, and transitions. The design has to feel monumental on a wide shot, but still hold intimacy when a presenter walks on stage,’ they explained.

Flexibility was ‘one of the biggest lessons from last year,’ the designers continued. The solution? More movable LED screens to seamlessly create new environments. ‘The fluidity of the space is really beautiful, and watching those transitions unfold during the show is something we’re particularly thrilled about,’ they added.

Like the awards, the stage is all about fostering excitement. But it’s also about celebrating range: ‘The aesthetic ends up feeling modern and minimal, but also very alive. It’s that tension between precision and nature, or between something heroic and something quietly atmospheric.’

Film sets possess the power to drop an audience into literally any reality. Whether designed to transport viewers thousands of years into the past or place them in an actuality where the dead can be reborn, a film’s scenery is a big part of making its fictional tale believable. Often, those alluring interiors, intricate exteriors and sweeping landscapes also ignite inspiration.

Ahead of the 98th Academy Awards on 15 March, we spoke with 2026’s production design nominees for insight into their world-building processes and soulful sets. Alongside the eventual winner, Frankenstein, the films recognised in the category include nominees Sinners, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, and One Battle After Another. Each film proves production design is one marvellous piece of the movie-magic puzzle.

Frankenstein – the winner

Fittingly, a mix of detailed sets and breathtaking locations were invented and stitched together for director Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. The film’s retelling of novelist Mary Shelley’s classic tale examines what it means to be a human and a monster through tortured scientist Victor Frankenstein’s (Oscar Isaac) creation of the Creature (Jacob Elordi). For the mythological realm, ‘Guillermo wanted something operatic and very hand-crafted with a carefully coded colour palette,’ says production designer Tamara Deverell, who collaborated with set decorator Shane Vieau. ‘My approach to the overall design was more theatrical than I had ever done, with an emphasis on sculpted elements and textured and layered finishes on all the sets,' Deverell adds.

Perhaps the most pivotal set is Frankenstein’s lab, a patina-enveloped abandoned water tower where circular motifs, like a massive window and carved Medusa head, symbolize the circle of life. Another major set is the Arctic exploration ship, which was fully built at a studio rather than created with visual effects. In contrast, Frankenstein’s ancestral estate introduces lavish interiors drenched in marble and gold. Multiple grand locations in England and Scotland were pieced together to portray the palatial property, including Wilton House, Burghley House, Gosford House, and Dunecht House. ‘Each set was a journey of compelling visual references, in-depth research, and the tenacity of Guillermo’s vision,’ says Deverell. ‘I am proud to bring his stories to life!’

Also nominated

Sinners

Director Ryan Coogler’s vampire horror film Sinners charts the journey of twin brothers (both played by Michael B Jordan) as they return home to Mississippi to open a juke joint – and face an evil threat to their community. In building the fantasy world that’s rooted in an American Jim Crow South reality, production designer Hannah Beachler aimed to capture the time period with historic accuracy but also ‘push aspects of those environments into sort of an artistic world that maybe just lives in a place where the supernatural is seen and felt’, says Beachler.

From the old saw mill turned juke joint to the church and characters’ homes, everything was built in Louisiana where the landscapes, including sugarcane fields, best served the story. The design team, including set decorator Monique Champagne, played with architectural lines and recycled decor across sets to heighten the universe, while keeping it grounded. They also used paint colours and finishes in unexpected ways: ‘We painted shadows on the structures where shadows would naturally fall to create depth and a sense that this world, while it looks like our reality, is a place where the supernatural and magic exists,’ says Beachler.

Hamnet

A moving portrayal of familial love and loss, Hamnet depicts the true tragedy that inspired William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. For the Chloé Zhao-directed film, production designer Fiona Crombie and set decorator Alice Felton reshaped Tudor-era settings into backdrops that offer an unforgettable performance of their own. Namely, the team built a version of London’s Globe Theatre that’s much more intimate and simpler than its great, ornate real-life counterpart. Reminiscent of the inside of a tree, the venue clad in reclaimed wood features a dressing room on the stage level, rather than perched above the stage, so that William (Paul Mescal) can better connect with his wife, Agnes, (Jessie Buckley) in the audience.

‘You research, you understand, and then you extract what you need and bend it,’ Crombie told Wallpaper* in 2025 of forgoing a meticulous recreation of the theatre circa the late 1500s. 'It’s to serve the story – to serve how you want your audience to feel.’

Beyond the theatre, the Shakespeare family’s English countryside home and its surrounding forest play with tension and freedom. The residence – with soft whitewashed walls, prominent timber beams and unyielding geometric forms – boxes the poet and his wife in. In the forest, Agnes embraces a liberating, deep connection to nature.

Marty Supreme

Set in 1950s New York, Marty Supreme follows a table tennis prodigy (Timothée Chalamet) who is determined to be recognised as the greatest player in the world. Production designer Jack Fisk, along with set decorator Adam Willis, set out ‘to create an immersive world that felt completely real’, says Fisk of reviving the bygone era for the Josh Safdie-directed film. ‘The casting was an early clue to how honest Josh wanted the film to be, and I tried to support that with a natural, almost documentary approach.’

The design team gave the Lower East Side’s Orchard Street a major exterior makeover to bring the tenement buildings and shops – including a shoe and a pet store – back in time. To portray Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) and Kay Stone’s (Gwyneth Paltrow) extravagant Upper East Side residence, the team rented out a reportedly $38-million mansion across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An array of other period-specific sites were moulded for the film, including a table tennis parlour, a rural farmhouse, a Broadway theatre and a London hotel.

‘I’m most proud of the crew – decorators, art directors, painters, carpenters, and graphic artists – working in a city of eight million people, rolling New York back 75 years while the street life continued all around us,’ says Fisk. ‘Our work is at its best when it goes unnoticed.’

One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another urgently unfolds across distinct California settings rarely seen on screen. The action thriller from director Paul Thomas Anderson tails a paranoid revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he launches into a desperate hunt to find his daughter (Chase Infiniti) when she goes missing. ‘The directive was really to scout as much as possible and gather all these pieces that became a visual tapestry, grounding these characters in the reality of their circumstances,’ production designer Florencia Martin told The Credits of exploring an unfamiliar side of the Golden State.

In California’s northern redwoods, the design team, also led by set decorator Anthony Carlino, devised an off-grid home with a tunnel to an outhouse. Outside of Santa Barbara at La Purísima Mission State Historic Park, they found the foundation for their women’s group compound. Near the Tijuana border, they recreated detention camps. Filming even expanded to El Paso, Texas, where Benicio Del Toro’s character’s apartment was built on the empty floor above of a real perfume shop. After pulling the viewer through escape hatches, secret society lairs and explosions, the movie climaxes with a car chase sequence in the east San Diego desert. Referred to by the team as the ‘River of Hills,’ the roads let the race play out like a heart-pounding roller coaster ride.

At last night’s BRIT Awards, held for the first time at Manchester’s Co-op Live, production designer Misty Buckley unveiled an entirely new set for the ceremony, featuring five interconnected stages animated by shifting towers and bridges.

Buckley, a multi-Emmy Award-winning designer whose credits span global tours for artists including Elton John, U2, Stormzy and Ariana Grande, as well as major ceremonies from the London 2012 Paralympics Closing Ceremony to the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, has long helped shape the visual language of live performance. Designing for a new venue, however, brought a different set of considerations for Buckley and the team, which included executive producer Sally Wood, Sony CEO Jason Iley and director Phil Heyes.

Wallpaper* sat down with Buckley ahead of the show to discuss what it takes to create a stage for one of the UK’s biggest nights in music – and how she approached the ceremony's move to Manchester.

Wallpaper*: This is the first year the BRIT Awards are being staged at Co-op Live in Manchester. How did you begin approaching the design for a completely new venue?

Misty Buckley: The move to Manchester presented a real opportunity to reimagine the BRITs. When you work in the same venue year after year, there’s inevitably a degree of muscle memory; you get very familiar with the venue. Moving to Co-op Live was a genuine reset. It allowed us to step back and reconsider everything: circulation, scale, and how the audience inhabits the space. It wouldn’t work to simply copy over the BRITs format from London. It’s a very different space to the O2 as it feels incredibly intimate despite its large scale.

We all felt refreshed and excited to stage this show in Manchester – a city with an extraordinary and influential music legacy. I think the Manchester team is pretty excited to host a major international music show and we wanted to reflect that inclusivity and collaboration in the set design.

W*: Can you talk us through the core idea behind this year’s set? What was the starting point?

MB: We loved the idea that 'The BRITs have landed in Manchester'. That became a starting point for the whole design. Rather than a traditional end-on stage, we’ve transformed Co-op Live into a fully immersive environment; something that sits somewhere between a space station and a landing site, with five interconnected performance stages, acting almost like portals. Each one activates with a performance, then hands over to the next.

The spacecraft idea isn’t meant to be literal sci-fi, it’s more a metaphor for arrival, possibility and forward movement.

W*: What were the first images, references or materials that went onto your moodboard?

MB: I often begin with mood-board imagery, but this time it was more instinctive. I could see the design in my head, very clearly and went straight into sketching. The central idea was multiple kinetic towers almost like industrial chandeliers – referencing Manchester’s industrial heritage. The towers are populated with a mix of solid and transparent LED panels alongside integrated lighting fixtures, allowing them to shift character depending on the performance. They can feel elegant and lightweight or dense and architectural. Crucially, they’re also functional: when you’re moving quickly between five stages, you need devices that allow for rapid resets. The towers can descend to the floor and act as closedown screens, helping us transition between performances, seamlessly.

At the back of the arena, there’s a vast panoramic screen that creates expansive vistas and fully immerses the audience in the environments designed by our content collaborators, North House.

Suspended above the central stage is a UFO-like structure, reinforcing the idea of arrival and anchoring the space visually from above. At key moments, bridges descend to physically connect the performance stages, allowing artists to move between them and emphasising the idea of one continuous, interconnected environment.

W*: Is there a particular technical or structural element this year that proved especially challenging?

MB: Despite the Co-op having significant weight loading capacity around the arena, we still have the inevitable challenges that are synonymous with a multi act award show. Once you hang PA, Lighting, screens etc, the weight allowance is somewhat reduced. Add to that, my two giant chandeliers and a UFO and weight is a lot.

We naturally want to accommodate every artist’s creative and their 'dream' set, so there is a delicate balance that our incredible Band Production Manager, Maggie Mouzakatis has to find.

W*: How do you design a set that works both for the live audience in the arena and for millions watching on television?

MB: It’s always a balancing act. In the arena, it’s about scale and immersion; you want the audience to feel completely surrounded by the energy of it.

For television, though, you’re thinking differently. It’s about framing, depth and how the camera moves through the space. This year’s multi-stage layout really supports that. It gives Phil Heyes, the director, incredible flexibility; layering action in the foreground and background, shooting across the arena, revealing one stage from another. Ultimately, you’re designing in two ways at once; in three dimensions for the audience in the room, and in moving frames for the viewers at home. When those two experiences complement each other, the show really comes to life.

W*: What does the design timeline for something like the BRITs actually look like, from first conversation to final build?

MB: The process really begins almost as soon as the previous show ends; with reflection. We look at what worked and what was less successful. Usually we have around eight months to design the BRITs, but this time the conversations started earlier, around March 2025, when the move to Manchester was first being explored.

By June, we had a strong vision that the whole team shared confidence in. From there, it moves into months of drawing, modelling, refining and aligning with production, lighting, video and then the conversations with artists about their individual sets.

The physical build comes relatively late in the process and we have a very limited time to load everything in, so the process is underpinned by an enormous amount of digital planning and collaboration. By the time we finally step into the arena, the show has already been designed dozens of times on paper; carefully tested, challenged and refined and then it’s all systems go.

W*: You’ve designed the BRIT Awards for many years now. How has the show evolved during that time, and has your own approach to it changed?

MB: This will be my eighth BRIT Awards as Production Designer, which feels both surreal and slightly ageing, if I’m honest. But I’m incredibly proud of it. I actually began my career 24 years ago as a design assistant on the BRITs, working for Bill Laslett. I was there from 2002 to 2005 before heading off to develop my own voice and career as a Production Designer. Then, in 2017, Jason Iley [Chairman of the BRITs Committee from 2017-2019] invited me back to design the show in my own right. It felt like a genuinely circular moment. Jason put a great deal of trust in me, which I’ll always be grateful for.

The show itself has evolved enormously. In the early 2000s, the artists were perhaps more outrageous in their behaviour. It was the Brit pop era so it was edgy and exciting – there was a certain unpredictability to it all and we probably got away with a lot more under the health and safety radar.

Today, the creativity is still bold, but the production values are far more sophisticated. The technical expectations are higher, there is more emphasis on full creative production of each artist's performance and the level of integration between set, lighting and screen content is much more advanced.

For me personally, it’s important to approach each year as if it’s the first. No two shows should ever look the same. Some years I lean into something more theatrical, other years it’s cleaner and more architectural. I also try to connect the set design to the BRIT Award itself (this year's is designed by Matthew Williamson) as it creates a subtle narrative thread through the show, which I think gives it cohesion and identity beyond a single night.

W*: What makes the BRITs unique from a production design perspective?

MB: The BRITs sit at an interesting intersection; they’re celebratory, but they’re also about cultural relevance. They need scale, but they also need that British grit and authenticity.

There’s a certain British tone; a balance of confidence and irreverence, that shapes the design language. It can’t feel too polished or too ceremonial. It has to feel alive and have a bit of edge, that you can’t always get away with on other ceremonies.

Because the UK music scene is so diverse, rich and iconic, the set has to be adaptable. It must hold everything from stripped-back intimacy to full-scale spectacle in one cohesive environment.

W*: Your work is inherently ephemeral. When the lights go down and the arena empties, what does that moment feel like for you?

MB: Honestly? I’d love to say I sit quietly in the empty arena and reflect on the creative journey - but the reality is usually far less poetic. By the time the lights go down, I’m already mentally juggling the next six projects, planning meals for my kids, thinking about laundry, and probably packing a suitcase to get to the Oscars on time. The reflection tends to come a little later, often when things are calmer and I can properly process what we built and what it meant. But in those quieter moments, what I do feel very clearly is gratitude. I genuinely love what I do. Designing something on that scale, collaborating with such talented people, and getting to create environments that hold these cultural moments; it’s a privilege. I feel very lucky that this is my job.

Nominated for nine Academy Awards, Sentimental Value is Norwegian film director Joachim Trier's story of family trauma and grief. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, the estranged father to two daughters, and much of the story unfolds around the family home, a red and black Dragestil (or ‘Dragon Style’) architectural marvel in Oslo that is being emptied following the death of the girls’ mother (the meaning of the title Sentimental Value comes from a scene when the pair are deciding what to keep, confronted with a table full of colourful vases).

Wallpaper* caught up with set designer Jørgen Stangebye Larsen, who talked us through the house's many lives within the film, as its design evolves over several decades.

‘Sentimental Value’ film set: inside the Borg family home

The film opens with the story of 11-year-old Nora Borg, who was assigned to imagine herself as an object for a school essay. As the camera hones in on details of her family home's exterior, a wonderfully, realistically lived-in structure featuring chipped paint, cobwebs, and nature taking over, a narrator reads: 'She knew at once she'd be their house. She described how its belly shook as she and her sister ran downstairs and out the back door. That it saw them take shortcuts through the fence and onto the road, where the house no longer could see them. She wondered if the house liked to be empty and light, or full and heavy. If the floors liked to be trodden on, if the walls were ticklish, if it ever felt pain. And she thought that yes, it probably liked to be full.'

Scenes of ordinary family life – children playing, arguments echoing across the house's floors – play in the background, and we get a glimpse of the 1990s interior’s eclectic composition. Some unmistakable icons come in clear focus, from an ‘Arco’ lamp by Achille Castiglioni for Flos towering over the living room, to a Bruno Mathsson chair, a base for the girls' pretend play.

Throughout the film, glimpses of the family's history are told through the house: Gustav's mother playing in the house in the 1930s, and the family's lives unfolding through the 1940s, 1950s and onwards to the present day, when its interiors are bare, as the house is empty.

The set design is rich with details, which include art, tech that evolves with the times, children's drawings and toys; the camera lingers on interiors to let viewers pause on the spaces, and these scenes are interspersed with shots of light and shadow as the sun enters through the wide windows (Gustav, a film director, is said to have been inspired by the light in his family home growing up).

'The house is outspoken,' says Stangebye Larsen, who worked closely with Trier on how the house would develop with the story.

‘Sentimental Value’: designing a home through history

1930s

Stangebye Larsen and Trier agreed that the house had to feel authentic (it was Trier's first time working on a period film), and that they didn't want to romanticise the time period the action was set in. 'I wanted to find out how this very house looked in Norway and why,' says the designer.

Looking through historical archives led him to discover a plethora of pattern, from the wallpapers to the pillows on the upholstered furniture. 'We spent a lot of time getting to know that period, and for each time, we created a mood that was also period-correct,' observes Stangebye Larsen. 'I was surprised by how visually elaborate it was.'

1950s

A decidedly lighter visual theme carries the house into the 1950s, as young Gustav is seen playing around the airy rooms. The idea of light is evident in these scenes, and it is easy to imagine the effect such interplays of reflections and shadows might have had on a young imaginative mind.

The set becomes visually brighter, with a colour palette veering towards neutrals, with yellow upholstery and pale wood signalling the new family's life in the house.

1960s-1980s

For a period between the 1960s and 1980s, Gustav's aunt occupies the house and the visual vibe shifts: colour and pattern become bolder and the aesthetic more eclectic. Art, a key element throughout the set design's evolution, becomes more prominent and includes prints by Norwegian painter Johannes Rian behind the sofa in the living room, while above the TV is a Gunnar S Gundersen composition.

1990s

In the 1990s, the house reaches its most exciting era, with mixes of furniture, art and objects that feel contemporary yet rooted in its history. 'Gustav moves in with his family, and it's not very natural that they would immediately change the house completely, but I thought they would use the house in a very different way,' explains Stangebye Larsen. A shift in layout is accompanied by a combination of new furniture and objects from the past – a red glass vase that recurs throughout the film, an upholstered lounge chair whose pattern recalls earlier iterations of the interiors.

Now, the house feels like a lived-in interpretation of a modern Scandinavian interior infused with global influences: Alvar Aalto furniture and objects, Marimekko flower-print kitchen towels, a Kartell ‘Bookworm’ bookshelf by Ron Arad, plates from the ‘Blue Fluted Mega’ series from Royal Copenhagen drying on the dish rack, a Poul Henningsen lamp above the dining table.

'I haven't really been aiming for having statement pieces, but I find that kind of furniture so well crafted [with] a lot of interesting shapes, [and] beautiful materials; they add so much to a room,' says Stangebye Larsen.

The interior is crafted like a real Norwegian home, with pieces that Stangebye Larsen himself remembers from his childhood home. The library, office of Gustav's wife, a psychotherapist, features the modular ‘BBB’ shelf system, originally designed in the 1950s by Edvin Helseth for Norway's Eidsvoll Rivefabrikk. 'My mom is a psychologist, we had those shelves in my home,' Stangebye Larsen explains, noting how a lot of his personal history inevitably ends up in the film sets he designs. 'You try to create something real and something you can believe in.'

To keep things very real, several Ikea pieces also make an appearance within the spaces, most notably a ‘Klippan’ sofa, a classic from the Swedish company, here upholstered in brown leather in the family's living room, and the modular ‘Niklas’ shelving units right behind, which Stangebye Larsen also remembers from his childhood bedroom.

Art is once again crucial in this time period, with one piece in particular recurring across shots. It is Samoa Remy's Oscillation between the very far and the very close, a black and white composition that hangs on the therapist's office wall and features a pattern of black and white dots and lines communicating throughout the large-scale tapestry.

Stangebye Larsen did extensive research into psychotherapists' offices and a statement art piece seemed to be de rigueur, so he curated the shelves behind the desk with small sculptures, as well as adding the artwork on the wall as a visual anchor. Working with set decorator Catrine Gormsen to gather the art collection for the house, he landed on Remy's piece: 'I connected to it because it was very simple, and I think it was something with all the dots and all the lines that felt like a collection of people through time, like this family.'

It is impossible not to connect with the interiors, and feel sadness for the home’s fate after the passing of its last Borg resident. Reflecting on this moment, Stangebye Larsen sees the property 'like an archive of all the memories and all the emotions that are stored in the material of the house. And you feel the presence of the past.

'I also lived in [the house] where my mom grew up, and I remember feeling that presence very strongly. And it was a comfort knowing that my grandparents had been there: when I was kind of lonely or feeling sad for some reason, I felt a little bit like they had also probably been here, been sad. Here it's the same, perhaps the story of the house is still there, inside the walls.'

Watch Sentimental Value via Mubi.com

Belgian designer Meryll Rogge’s anticipated debut show as creative director of Marni, which took place during Milan Fashion Week A/W 2026 yesterday (26 February), was first teased across social media with a series of short videos directed by Davide Rapp, captioned ‘echoes of the familiar’ and showing just that: a key sliding into a lock, coffee being poured into a glazed mug, a bakelite telephone. Even the show invitation mimicked, luxuriously, that most ubiquitous of office stationery – the post-it note. ‘I have a very personal connection to Marni,’ Rogge tells Wallpaper*. ‘It’s a brand that shaped my design sensibility during my formative years, and through the show I wanted to acknowledge that sense of familiarity.’

This familiarity – with a few surprises, of course – was a throughline for both collection and scenography, the latter of which was a close collaboration between Rogge and research-based design agency Formafantasma (Wallpaper* Designers of the Year in 2021, and the brains behind our 2026 Design Awards trophy). In the space, founders Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin transformed Marni’s headquarters with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches, while a play on perception came in mirrored panels which were partially painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’, from car headlights to office chairs. The effect was a space which felt familiar – banal office space; the entranceway to an apartment block – though hard to place.

‘The structure of the set suggests a bourgeois interior wooden frame, hints of domestic architecture – but fragmented, slightly taken apart. It feels familiar yet unsettled, as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ Trimarchi and Farresin tell Wallpaper*. These recognisable elements, resonant yet subverted through scale and deconstruction – for example a monumental doormat covering the floor in lieu of a carpet – were part of ‘a very clear atmosphere’, that Rogge already had in mind for the space when Formafantasma was brought in: ‘something real, unpretentious, open – but without suggesting a specific place’.

‘Our conversations with Meryll Rogge started from an open discussion about what “reality” means in fashion,’ say Trimarchi and Farresin. ‘We found that interesting, especially because a runway show is, by nature, constructed. It is a staged moment, carefully framed and controlled. Instead of trying to disguise that, we chose to acknowledge it. The set became a way to think about how fashion exists somewhere between lived experience and representation, never entirely one or the other.

‘We also spoke about how fashion moves through domestic and social environments,’ they continue. ‘Clothing is worn in kitchens, offices, streets – not only on runways.’ Indeed, in its vivid assemblage of elements – which shuffled between pragmatism and glamour – Rogge’s debut collection captured a human way of dressing, where a parka might be worn over a suit, or a sweater over a cocktail dress.

A penchant for elevating the everyday has long been a speciality for the Belgian designer, whose much-loved eponymous own brand, founded in 2020, is known for its imaginative take on practical dressing. Although the move to Marni marks her first role at the head of a major house, Rogge is a seasoned veteran of the industry, with stints at Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten, and is obviously staying true to the aesthetic values she has honed along the way. In 2022, she told Wallpaper* about her desire to create ‘pieces which evoke a sense of nostalgia, in a familiar and reassuring way’, a foreshadowing of the intentions she set for Marni with this energetic debut.

Follow our live coverage of Milan Fashion Week A/W 2026.

‘When fashion, film and architecture work together, it’s an empowering thing,’ says film director Luca Guadagnino, who explored the links between the mediums when designing the show set for Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior womenswear collection, for S/S 2026, which debuted last October. A collaborative project, it was the second time Guadagnino and production designer Stefano Baisi had worked with Anderson, who was the costume designer on Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer.

Anderson’s brief for the show was for a standalone space that also acknowledged his respect for Dior’s history. Says Guadagnino: ‘The way Jonathan works is to involve people dear to him, pushing everybody to get to their limits. It’s beautiful to see that the space we created was really real – physical, massive, very architectural. It didn’t feel transient.’

The purpose-built space was dominated by an inverted pyramid that protruded from the ceiling, becoming a screen as the show began. On it, played a specially commissioned film by British director Adam Curtis, best known for his documentaries on power, politics and the media. Anderson was keen for the space to be monumental, a concept he introduced in the runway set for his S/S 2026 menswear collection for Dior in Paris, which drew inspiration from Berlin’s atmospheric Gemäldegalerie art museum. ‘There is always a lovely playfulness in what Jonathan does,’ says Guadagnino.

The womenswear show also responded to its location in the Jardin des Tuileries, opposite the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre. ‘We started to reflect on the axis that connected the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, and on the idea of an iconic Paris landmark. The reverse pyramid was one of the topics we discussed, and that was the moment in which Stefano and I brought this architectural museum sensitivity to the place. And then – and this was a beautiful intuition from Jonathan – we thought of using the pyramid not just as decoration, but as the diamond upon which this video could be shown, letting you into the new era at Dior.’

The modernist backdrop was offset by the evocative narrative of Curtis’ film, which interspersed archival footage with his distinctive eclecticism. Clips from Dior’s history are juxtaposed against fragments from horror movies. Curtis keeps the anxiety cranked up throughout, ending abruptly on a pure white frame, signalling the clean slate Anderson is beginning at Dior.

‘I think the documentary-style way in which Adam works inspired Jonathan, showing a better way to communicate,’ says Baisi. ‘He has this big challenge of designing a new collection for a brand that has its own important history. He’s been very successful in writing his own vision. Using irony is the key to his success, and this also comes through in the lens of the way Adam works.’

Taken together, the film and the set confront Dior’s history, before turning the page to Anderson’s new chapter. ‘The idea of making a mini haunted mansion film – which is traditionally Anglo-Saxon Gothic, from an Anglo-Saxon designer and filmmaker – shows that the ghosts inhabit the past and the present, and it’s inevitable that we have to deal with those ghosts,’ Guadagnino says. ‘What was beautiful here was that not only did Dior go for this very evocative piece, but when the movie finished during the show, the audience had an incredible reaction to it even before the first look was out. It was very emotional and very strong.’

dior.com

This article appears in the Wallpaper* March Style 2026 issue, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

For more than a decade, Alexander Wessely has moved fluidly between worlds – from his early years roaming the streets of Stockholm in the 1990s, absorbed in graffiti and drawing, through photography and film, to the sculptural installations and large-scale scenography that now define his work. His visual language tends toward the monumental: strobes, towering forms, extreme contrast and a distinctly ritualistic energy typify his work, staged everywhere from concert halls to the global pop arena, including projects with artists such as The Weeknd, FKA Twigs and Swedish House Mafia.

Now, that sensibility enters an unexpected setting. For the first time in its history, the Nobel Prize ceremony (held 10 December 2025) was reimagined through a contemporary artist’s lens, with Wessely given rare freedom to reshape the banquet inside Stockholm City Hall. His response – a three-act meditation on light, atmosphere and human progress – marked a striking departure for both the artist and the institution.

Ahead of the ceremony, Wallpaper* spoke with Wessely about the origins of the project, the process behind it, and the ideas that shaped this unprecedented commission.

Wallpaper*: How did this project first come about? It’s a new direction for you and something unprecedented for the Nobel Prize.

Alexander Wessely: It came through Jacob Mühlrad, the composer. He introduced me to the Nobel Foundation earlier this year, and we started talking about the possibility of this and what it could potentially be.

It’s very exciting. And like you said, in one way it’s quite a different scenario for me to be in, and in another way it’s the same thing as usual – music and light.

W*: When you first received that introduction, was there any kind of brief or structure? Or were you given a blank canvas?

AW: It was pretty much a blank canvas. They gave me creative freedom to approach it however I saw it. Jacob sent me the initial music, and I’ve been working with him previously – we’ve done things at the Royal Dramatic Theatre here in Sweden, at Berwaldhallen, and a couple of things of that nature.

We’ve invited each other into our [respective] worlds over the years, and I’m very gravitated towards his music – the sort of ritualistic tone of it, the serious nature of it, but with that glimpse of hope. It aligns very well with what I do.

I received the music and went to Athens, my second home in Greece, and lived with it for almost three weeks. I started writing the ideas and then came back to Sweden, sat down with the team, and started building out this narrative and this world and what it could be.

W*: When you’re living with the music like that, do visuals arrive quickly? Or is it more gradual?

AW: Yes and no. It does come, but sometimes I have to hold myself back a bit. It’s a fine balance – especially in a context like this. I always want to put things on the very tip and push it to the edge, but I also want to respect the context.

I’m a big user of strobes and very strong, heavy lights and extremely dynamic, high-impact visuals. But with live TV and with the Nobel context in general, I needed to hold that side of me back and invite viewers into a more roomy, dynamic journey – something more pulsation-driven, softer, wrapping people in the experience instead of them just looking at a wall over there.

W*: And the performance unfolds across three acts?

AW: Yes. The first act is an emulation of a sunrise – a dusky silhouette, a hard, almost dystopic introduction, like a new beginning.

Then, in the second act, we introduce another element: a light pillar. It’s basically a laser pillar, a physical object in the centre of the stage shooting up towards the sky.

In the third act, we introduce projection. We have multiple projectors mapping the room to create a surreal situation where I hope people start to wonder what’s real and what’s not – what’s physical and what’s digital. Because I really want to play with atmosphere. We have heavy smoke pouring out of the windows, creating emulations of fog or waterfalls. Blending the physical and the digital really intrigues me. I want people questioning what they’re actually looking at.

W*: You had a live audience in the room, but also a global televised audience. How did that shape the staging?

AW: It’s broadcast live, and there are around 2,000 people in the hall. The performance takes place in front of this huge staircase and along the long floor, with the audience sitting at tables on either side.

They’re looking in one direction, but the experience takes place from the sides and the front. As the evening goes on, they start to feel themselves immersed more and more into it – as we add atmosphere, introduce projection and so on.

W*: And Stockholm City Hall itself – did the space influence what you could or couldn’t do?

AW: It’s a sacral, almost church-like architecture, and that plays a role in a lot of my work. We’re in a 150-year-old building with these 30m ceilings, beautiful stone and brick, huge painted-glass windows.

The space is interesting in itself and in a lot of ways makes my work easier – at least with what I want to accomplish – because just placing a light pillar in the centre of this space becomes surreal in itself.

It’s almost like a cheat code, because the room is already so good. At the same time it sets boundaries, because it’s perfect already in many ways, so adding to it is complex. That’s why I keep it minimal in a purposeful way. The idea might start with seven elements, and then we sit down, take it in, peel it back, peel it back, until it’s balanced.

W*: Is peeling things back – reducing the idea to its core – your usual design process?

AW: Yes. It can be the biggest, most advanced space with 50,000 people, but I love the idea of pushing it to its core. Rather than having all of these things, what can we accomplish with, for instance, one strong beam from this direction, mimicking the sun?

I’m fascinated by how powerful one light source can be when you push atmosphere into the space with haze and smoke. And you actually made me think about that, because I realised it’s the same approach I had in a sculpture exhibition I did a couple of years ago at Fotografiska in Sweden. That whole exploration was about peeling back the layers of the human – exposing the purest form of what we are.

This is the same. Bring it back down. Strip away the extra things. Keep the purest form.

W*: Working in such a charged architectural space – does that make the process more enjoyable, or more challenging?

AW: Right now in my life and career, I enjoy this more. Maybe because it’s more challenging. There are more restrictions – the building is protected, you can’t hang things wherever you want, things are fragile, it’s not flexible.

In a stadium, you have a blank canvas. Here, the architecture is already a beautiful piece of art. That makes it more complex, but also more intriguing.

W*: You mentioned the installation period is very tight. What does this final stretch feel like for you?

AW: We’re in the studio working almost 24/7, making sure everything is correct and still doing some trial and error. We start building on Sunday (7 December 2025) evening – about four days before the ceremony.

I’ve become good at handling stress, which is probably not a good thing, because I don’t feel it, but I know it’s inside me. I’m never stressed about what the audience will think. As long as I’m happy and proud of the work we did, then it’s happy days for me.

W*: And when everything finally comes to life – do you get a sense of excitement from seeing something that began in your head become real?

AW: Yes. That’s still the driving factor. Seeing it come alive is the rewarding part. Then the dark part arrives quickly. Months or years of work are over after 60 or 90 minutes, and a big black hole opens up. It’s empty. And then it’s on to the next, in a weird way.

W*: You said earlier that you don’t mind whether people ‘like’ it or not. When you’re designing, do you still hope to make people feel something specific?

AW: I’m very intrigued by making people question what’s real and what’s not – this sort of existential terror. I feel I want to ignite something inside the audience, whatever it might be.

I love the idea of people leaving with extremely different opinions. Not one aligned reality. I’d rather hear someone say it’s shit and explain why than have everyone think it’s just cool or good.

W*: Do projects like this continue to inform what comes next? Do elements carry forward into future work?

AW: Yes. I’m bringing in a couple of projection elements I used at Museu del Disseny in Barcelona. Some things from Berwaldhallen [concert hall in Sweden] are in here too. And then there are new elements.

I’ll most likely condense what felt best and bring that into the next project. It’s like a never-ending puzzle. I’ve always collected things – postcards when I was young, vintage watches from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s later on. Time fascinates me a lot.

I feel a career is like collecting. You add experiences, ideas, thoughts. You can remove things from the collection and add new ones. That’s how I approach projects. I look into my mental collection, apply things, and add new pieces, remove old ones.

W*: So there’s no grand career plan – it’s more about following what feels right next?

AW: Exactly. It’s terrible in a way. Since I was about 20, I’ve had this feeling everything is going to go to shit. When I reach certain milestones, I reboot.

With photography, when I reached certain points, I said: OK, let’s stop. Let’s investigate film. I did the same again. Then creative direction and art.

What’s stuck so far is having one leg in the cultural institutional space and one leg in pop culture and commercial space. That balance suits me – I get easily bored, so I need to challenge myself.

W*: So after working on something monumental, you might go in the opposite direction – do something completely different, something much smaller in scale, like a sculpture?

AW: Yes. I will. It’s like, when I’m standing in Mexico City at four in the morning looking at this huge skeleton of a production and thinking, why am I doing this? What’s the purpose? I go back to the hotel and fall back on that idea – me in a monastery in central Greece, close to Meteora, sculpting, and I get calm.

That’s the light at the end of the tunnel. Even though I love what I do, I sometimes really question the purpose of it, but then I can see the impact it makes on thousands of people. It makes me feel good for a bit – and then it’s on to the next. It’s interesting.

In Hamnet, director Chloé Zhao’s new film based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, there’s a moment when William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) stages one of his first performances. It isn’t yet at London’s Globe Theatre, but in his own backyard in the English countryside. He leads his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), out the back door, blindfolded. When the cloth is lifted, she finds herself the audience to a small epic: their son, the titular Hamnet, wears a woven sack turned cape, while their daughters dart through makeshift parapets of brush and bloom.

As Hamnet moves between the intimacy of family life and the spectacle of theatre, every location reads as a kind of stage; a distinct zone in which a drama unfolds. 'From beginning to end, it was a process of uncovering and discovery,' says production designer Fiona Crombie. She and Zhao often discussed how the visual world could perform for the narrative as much as the actors themselves.

Crombie, known for her work on period films such as The King and The Favourite, admits she once had little affection for Tudor architecture, that hallmark of Shakespeare’s era, with its whitewashed walls framed by heavy timber. Returning to the period for Hamnet, she found new meaning in its strict geometry. As Mescal’s Shakespeare moved through the domestic space, she began to see ‘boxes everywhere – all these lines where he’s constrained by a building’. That confinement became a counterpoint to Buckley’s Agnes, whose spirit is inseparable from the forest bordering their home. ‘There ends up being this interesting visual contrast,’ Crombie says, ‘of Agnes being out in this rambling nature and then coming to be contained by these boxes.’

Whereas the traditional forms of Tudor architecture fit naturally into the story’s dynamics, the iconic Globe Theatre required subtle adaptation. Crombie repositioned the Globe’s dressing room from its traditional perch overlooking the stage to a more grounded, eye-level view so that William could be closer to, and connect more intimately with, Agnes as she experiences his play from the audience.

‘You research, you understand, and then you extract what you need and bend it,’ she says of not strictly replicating the historic theatre. 'It’s to serve the story – to serve how you want your audience to feel.’ In Hamnet, this idea extends beyond architecture. The stage becomes a place where life shapes art and art, in turn, reshapes life. The theatre offers structure, a container for narrative, yet that narrative constantly strains against its frame, spilling outward into lived experience. Crombie’s imagined world for Zhao’s Shakespearean tale captures that tension: a space grounded in history, yet flexed to hold emotion, memory, and invention all at once.

Hamnet is on limited release in the US from 26 November 2025, and wider US release from 12 December. It’s in UK cinemas from 9 January 2026

Hitting big screens this week (17 October), Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt stars Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri and Andrew Garfield in a twisty psychological thriller from a script by Nora Garret. Set in New Haven on the Yale University campus, the movie follows the mundane life of two university professors and a PHD student as they navigate accusations and secrets.

Watching the film is worth it for the sets alone, their locations becoming characters in themselves and sucking in viewers with their multilayered, well-crafted approach.

Architect and production designer Stefano Baisi has previously worked with the director on production design for Queer (read our interview with Guadagnino and Daniel Craig) and has taken on the challenge of recreating iconic New Haven locations and the Yale Campus for After the Hunt’s production (filming took place in London and Cambridge). 'Everything you see on screen has been faithfully recreated from scratch, based on extensive visual and historical research,' says Baisi.

'Being so tactile, textured and layered, sets like these are a gift to actors,' said Garfield. The film is set in 2019, and the team did painstaking research to reproduce its public locations as faithfully as they could, taking key Yale spaces back to their pre-pandemic appearance.

The film also marks the return to the cinema of cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who had worked on legendary blockbusters including Spike Lee’s Clockers and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, but had been absent from movies for over two decades.

Hassan Sayeed was able to reproduce the East Coast light by orienting the set to capture the sun in a way that was faithful to the geographical location. He and Guadagnino looked at the likes of cinematographer Gordon Willis for inspiration: 'We were looking at those [directors of photography] who envelop reality with a kind of gilded light,' comments Guadagnino.

After the Hunt film set: Alma's apartment

Design lovers will be sucked into the film from the incredible apartment interior of main character Alma (played by Roberts) and her husband Frederik. 'A set like [this] informs you in ways you’re not even ever aware of,' says Roberts. 'You start slowly getting saturated in the subtleties until you’re just these two people living in this space that is home.'

The apartment is inspired by turn-of-the-century New York interiors, with the Langham Building and Dakota Building serving as specific inspiration to Baisi and Guadagnino. They created a set based on a 'Classic Seven' apartment typology, with a formal dining room, living room, kitchen, three bedrooms, maid's quarters, and two baths. The set features wood-panelling, mirrored surfaces and decorated ceilings, with rooms interconnecting to reflect its inhabitants' rich lives.

'We wanted an interior that could quietly tell the story of these characters,' says Baisi. A multilayered family history is portrayed within the space, imagined as a family home passed on through generations.

This fictional interior was initially the home of Frederik's grandparents, who fled Nazi-occupied Europe, bringing influences from the Bauhaus and Wiener Werkstätte. Baisi looked closely at the work of architect and designer Josef Hoffman, whose designs were recreated both in specific furniture elements (such as chairs and a table in the dining room) as well as whole rooms, like the kitchen, inspired by a late 19th-century Hoffman project.

'Alma is cosmopolitan, [the couple] had travelled the world, and so we also included Haitian and North African art within the space,' adds Baisi.

More elements came from Guadagnino's own collection, from Gio Ponti chairs to Piero Portaluppi sofas, as well as a Guglielmo Ulrich bed. Every element – from the books in the libraries to the contents of the drawers – was carefully crafted by the duo, to give a sense of a space well lived in that becomes a theatrical set for some of the film's most poignant scenes.

'Stefano and I did extensive research to choose every book, every work of art, every piece of cookware and every miniscule detail,' adds the director. 'And the apartment’s design became a great open theatre for exploring power dynamics.'

Guadagnino uses the apartment in a theatrical way, making the most of its layout and visual richness. An opening scene is set across its sitting and dining rooms, with the camera view changing throughout the scene as we meet the characters. The bedroom becomes the stage for a visual repetition that recurs throughout the movie, while the kitchen is the set of a memorable scene that makes the most of the room's layout and entrance.

The New Haven Wharf apartment

The grandeur and multi-layered design approach of Alma's home is placed in heavy contrast with her Wharf apartment, an austere, bare space that becomes a plot device to unveil different aspects of her history.

Placing the character in this space comes from a desire to represent the reality of a town like New Haven, and create a contrasts with the typical landmarks of the city centre with its Gothic towers. 'So these large windows allow you to see the chimneys of the wharf, a landscape that is very different and much more industrial.'

The Yale campus and iconic locations in New Haven, Connecticut

If you have a peek at online discussions about the film, there is a general sense that it has been filmed on location at Yale, such is the work done by the crew to recreate venues and spaces that are key to the storyline.

In particular, the sets of the Tandoor restaurant – a New Haven restaurant that opened inside a former diner – and popular bar Three Sheets were reproduced with their pre-2019 interiors, following extensive image research.

'As a designer, being guided by a story is extremely fulfilling, and it gave me the opportunity to access locations that are usually inaccessible; it is a great privilege,' says Baisi. 'I have dreamed of accessing these cinematic spaces since I was a child, and I found that compared to architecture, working on film production allows the creative process to be constant.'

This summer, Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny has been taking over El Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot for a 30-date residency for a musical moment that is as historic as it is culturally relevant for the Caribbean state. While this is not a surprise move for a musician who has always been clear about the strong ties he holds with his native island, it feels like an unprecedented creative move and one that speaks to artist Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio's dedication to his country and its people, traditions and culture.

Starting in July and running until 14 September 2025, it has been calculated that the 30-date residency (titled 'No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí', I Don’t Want to Leave Here) alone brought $200m into the local economy (raising Puerto Rico’s GDP by 0.15%) with 400,000 people coming to San Juan for the event, and early tickets reserved for Puerto Rico residents.

The sold-out show features a set by long-term collaborator Adrian Martinez, Co-Founder and Head of Creative for LA-based design agency Sturdy, offering a visual tribute to Puerto Rico through landscape, vegetation, and vernacular architecture.

We speak to Martinez to have a peek behind the scenes of the Bad Bunny Puerto Rico residency.

Adrian Martinez on creating Bad Bunny's Puerto Rico residency

Wallpaper*: How has your work with Bad Bunny creatively evolved over time?

Adrian Martinez: It’s been an evolution of working with him and the team on live content / visuals, creative direction in some projects and now working on the overall show on a larger scale.

W*: What have been the key moments in your collaboration?

AM: We’ve been fortunate enough to be involved with a lot of shows over the past few years. We worked as part of the creative team for P FKN R in 2021, El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo and World’s Hottest Tour in 2022, The Grammys and Coachella in 2023, Most Wanted Tour in 2024 and, now, The Residency.

W*: How much involvement did Bad Bunny have in the final result?

AM: The show is very much a reflection of him throughout every bit. I won’t go into the process itself because that’s private but I will say he’s across every bit. It is very much his fingerprint.

W* Can you tell me about your own experience of Puerto Rico?

AM: I have been able to spend a lot of time in Puerto Rico now – working with artists, getting to know the culture, making some of my most valued friendships, traveling the island. It is one of the most special places on earth, and I value those experiences heavily. I’m thankful for it and look forward to learning, seeing and experiencing more.

W*: Bad Bunny as an artist, and this residency specifically, embody a very specific connection to Puerto Rico. How does the design for the show reflect the artist’s ethos?

AM: The show is very much a reflection of him as a person. However, it’s certainly intended to reflect the identity of his people as a whole. And, for those who come in from other parts of the world, it very beautifully puts his island’s culture on display for all to see.

W* How is the set design showcasing the traditions and spirit of Puerto Rico? Can you give me some examples?

AM: The mountain reflects how alive the island is in terms of its ecosystem. The Flamboyan’ tree is seen commonly across the island and offers a beautiful splash of colour across so much of Puerto Rico. The plantain trees are also representative of an extremely important crop to the people of the island and beyond. The house party element also points to its own set of energy and traditions in Puerto Rico.

W*: The traditional Puerto Rican house is such a key element of the stage; I have seen people commenting on social media that it looks exactly like the house they grew up in. It looks incredibly realistic and detailed. Can you tell me more about this element of the set, how it was conceived and developed, and what design details are key to this part of the set, for you and the artist?

AM: This part of the set design was handled almost entirely by a team of local scenic art directors, so they were able to pull from a lot of their own experiences and points of view, to create the feeling of being in an authentic home on the island. Goes without saying, but it was absolutely nailed.

W*: How do the artists on stage interact with the house – what role does it play in the show?

AM: Some, not all, artists who are invited to perform at the show come in and out through the house. They are able to perform in the front yard or go on top to the roof and deliver their set. It is pretty cool because they have a lot of room to move around and get close to audiences in different parts of the room. It is a full-on house party show after show.

W*: For the stage, you have created a full mountain landscape complete with vegetation – can you tell me more about the elements that compose it, and how this set is used?

AM: When it comes to the vegetation, this all came together in a full team collaboration with the local scenic art direction team, who gave the greenery an immense amount of detail. Once the stage was completed, we had a plantain farm on stage right, a ‘Flamboyan’ tree on stage left, a small cave at the top of the mountain, and a billboard set into the mountain itself. Over the course of the show, each stage has its dedicated set of moments that come into play.

W*: Were there any external references or inspirations, elements you looked at to inform these designs? What does your moodboard for this project look like?

AM: The moodboard is DEEP. We always do so much research and pay a ton of attention to everything going on in relation to any artist’s rollout as we’re working on a show in order to stay as true and in line with the creative as possible. Additionally, we’re looking much beyond reference websites, going through books and other tangible sources of historical and graphical information.

W*: This is a long-term residency in a single place – what role did this set up play in the way you conceived the set? Does it give you more freedom compared to a set that needs to travel and adapt to different stages?

AM: Much more freedom is granted. From the scale of the design to the amount of scenic elements included, the screen mounted overhead, the audio being mounted completely out of sight – this show is truly unlike any other with features that a touring show could never execute.

Piers Hanmer has always had a gift for seeing the soul in spaces. ‘I don't think you can really learn it,’ says the London-born, New York-based set designer. ‘I remember my mum getting a new kitchen fitted when I was about 14. Apparently, I came down from my room and said, “Oh, that's a terrible idea. You're cutting the window there, the sight line is all wrong.” Then they changed it. It’s a weird thing, I've always understood space and I've always understood colour.’

You may not have heard of Hanmer, but you’ve likely seen his work. One of the most sought-after set designers in the industry, he’s had a hand in creating some of the most inventive fashion images of the past two decades, working prolifically alongside greats like Annie Leibovitz, Craig McDean, Willy Vanderperre and Steven Klein. Arriving in September 2025 (and available for pre-order now), a new book maps a journey through his remarkable career, unveiling the making of his defining sets from the mid-2000s to the present day.

Piers Hanmer: Distracted by Fashion

Rather than a glossy fashion tome destined to collect dust on a coffee table, Distracted by Fashion arrives as an invitingly personal scrapbook, mixing sketches, moodboard references, journal entries and sublime editorial imagery. With an opening conversation with Edward Enninful, the book lifts the veil on the little-documented art of set-making while celebrating an adrenalised era of fashion – when ambitions were as big as budgets, and anything felt possible.

Hanmer’s journey to becoming a set designer wasn’t straightforward. Initial dreams of becoming a photographer found him in Los Angeles in his late twenties, somewhat lost and looking for work. ‘I was really struggling to make any money,’ he remembers. ‘Then I got this opportunity to be an assistant on a shoot for American Vogue with Steven Meisel. They were shooting Nicole Kidman. I was just a lowly PA, picking up the trash and getting coffees for people, but I remember walking into the studio and seeing this extraordinary set. I was like, “What is this insane world?” I was immediately hooked.’

Hanmer swiftly started assisting set designers between New York and Los Angeles, and not long after, an encounter with Annie Leibovitz altered the trajectory of his career forever. ‘We were sitting on the backlot of Paramount Studios and had been shooting an Olympian in a big glass tank of water,’ he says. ‘Annie just turned to me and said, “I've been watching you. I'd like to hire you to design sets.” It was a lightning-doesn't-strike-twice moment. Suddenly, I was working with all these editors at American Vogue and Vanity Fair, and all these other amazing photographers. Everything just went whoosh within a few months.’

While he wasn’t aware of it at the time, Hanmer made his ascent during a golden era of editorial. Print magazines were at their peak influence and the worlds of celebrity and fashion were blurring, leading to a period of relentless, star-strewn creativity. From the hundreds of sets Hanmer created, his most memorable are dissected in Distracted by Fashion, from the flowers exploding whimsically from office furniture in an editorial for W magazine to the visual delight of a plastic bag placed at the edge of a frame, echoing the texture of a model’s shaggy pink fur jacket for Vogue in 2009. Thumbing through the book, it's evident that set designers are the unsung world builders on set – so often behind the magic of an image, yet rarely rising to the status of their photographer peers.

It’s also true that very few fashion books are produced from the perspective of a set designer – and perhaps none that reveal the treasure hunting, physical heft and architectural assembly behind their work. It’s something that legendary photographer Craig McDean, a longtime collaborator of Hanmer’s, first pointed out to him and which set the idea for the book in motion. ‘It was during lockdown on a socially distanced walk with Craig,’ Hanmer remembers. ‘He said, “Why have you never done a book? I've got so many pictures of you and your team on set. You can just use my archive, help yourself.”’

Taking McDean’s behind-the-scenes images as a starting point, Hanmer worked with Brixton-based publisher Morel Books on the book, which mimics the 10x8-inch workbooks he’s kept for decades. Beneath its cover is an eclectic peek into his creative process, where sleek editorial imagery is jumbled with scrawled notes and drawings of set mock-ups, and iPhone snaps of sunsets, trash, and rain through windshields that reveal his palette of inspiration. ‘I just wanted it to feel really tactile and unprecious,’ says Hanmer. ‘None of it's in order. I wanted to pull back the curtain and give people who don't live on sets a sense of what it was like for us to put those stories together.’

While many creatives find going through their archives an arduous process, for Hanmer it was quite the opposite. ‘Making the book, it really it struck me how I'm missing a creative outlet,’ he says. ‘I still work as a set designer, I create a lot of sets for commercial clients, but it's a very different process. My overreaching feeling is what an incredibly creative time it was for all of us. Edward and I talk about it in the book – how you had to nail it every time otherwise you got replaced. From that pressure came amazing work. It really just pushed every creative button in your body.’

In Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, A Single Man, protagonist George is a struggling English professor, sinking into depression as he goes through life following his partner’s death. The challenges of bringing George’s rich interior world to life were successfully navigated in the eponymous 2009 film, starring Colin Firth and directed by Tom Ford. Now, they are considered again as Isherwood’s masterpiece comes to the stage.

Set designer Chiara Stephenson, known for her work with musical artists SZA, Lorde, Florence + the Machine, and Björk, created the aesthetic of the show presented by The Royal Ballet and Factory International (at London’s Linbury Theatre, 8-20 September). The challenge lay in creating a discreet juxtaposition between George’s inner and outer worlds; here, she tells us how she brought Isherwood’s book to life, and why it was time for A Single Man to embrace a new life as a ballet.

Wallpaper*: Christopher Isherwood conjured up such a rich and specific world in the novel. Where did you begin when translating this to the stage?

Chiara Stephenson: I think you’ve said it there in the question. Isherwood conjures such a specific and detailed descriptive world of 1960s LA that you can't possibly ask the dancers to try to tangibly hold that or physically interact with the sheer amount of locations and contextual detail. We essentially decided to address Isherwood's style of writing and his lens on life in the aesthetic of the show. Specificity and ultra attention to detail were important, but as a mesh and matrix [providing a] background for our protagonist. The concept was to create a literal apparatus of life’s mundane details to hold him up each day, from the steering wheel of his dead lover's car to poached eggs on toast… it’s all there to reflect on as the story and emotion unfold in the physicality of the dancers.

W*: What was important to you when creating the external context of George’s rich inner life?

CS: Isherwood’s writing has this fantastic over-analytical lens on life. It’s the contrast and extremities of human existence that [director and choreographer] Jonathan Watkins and I were keen to magnify.

The finish of the staging and set details is coated in a layer of grey dust, using a process we developed with the Royal Opera House called flocking. It gives everything an almost velvet-like, powdery quality. This demonstrates the blurring of the reality of the details of George's day-to-day life, an intentional response to the themes of the book regarding grief and mental health: it acts as the foggy filter that depression and grief might place over the eyes of George. This means that George is on a different plane, detached from the day-to-day existence happening around him. What we quite literally pop out of that framework is both the body and mind of George, [represented respectively] by Ed Watson [the former Royal Ballet Principal] on stage, and the sensational John Grant [the singer-songwriter behind the show's music with composer Jasmin Kent Rodgman] framed in a diagrammatic cross-section of a man's head.

We also wanted to create a sense of the macro and the micro of George's point of view. We wanted people to feel a shift of perspective across a very broad landscape, which John captures with the music, as do the dancers. They traverse both the arc of George's day, and the physical representations of human urges or emotion, which override and overwhelm his senses. [He’s] a very observational yet grief-stricken soul trying to find new meaning in life.

W*: What can we expect from your design? What have you enjoyed most about bringing this book to a new medium?

CS: When both the book and the film are such iconic contributions to literature and broader culture, what do you do with the dance adaptation? We didn't want to ignore these cult classics, but we decided early on to take inspiration both from Isherwood's life and from the first ever printed edition of the book, which Don Bachardy [Isherwood's lifetime partner] designed back in 1964. The graphics of the book cover include a simple outline of a man, which also references Isherwood's portrayal of what it means to be human, often coming from an almost medical, biological perspective. We read [about] Isherwood's early ambitions to be a doctor, and so liked that we could somehow try to visually represent George's mind and body in this anatomical way. We took inspiration from the artist and graphic designer Fritz Khan, Isherwood's contemporary, who was creating incredible visual communication at the same time.

What I have enjoyed most is being a part of this incredible hybrid of a show. It's theatre, ballet, contemporary dance and a great gig all packed into one; the fusion of artforms is where I get most excited. Jonathan Watkins' clarity of vision has been a joy to bounce off and respond to. Just the right amount of direction mixed with a free rein to explore form and feeling and meaning.

The staging is one of the most detailed but also static designs I’ve created, and with purpose: to make you appreciate the very essence of what it means to be alive. This is brought to life through movement, through Ed Watson and the dancers, alongside John Grant and Jasmin Kent Rodgman's deeply moving music. You can't move on that stage for the sheer volume of artistic heavyweights in play. To cradle that has been a joy.

‘A Single Man’ is on from 8-20 September at Linbury Theatre; tickets at rbo.org.uk

French interior architect and furniture designer Pierre Yovanovitch is known for creating compelling design showcases – from the Paris showroom of his brand, Pierre Yovanovitch Mobilier, to narrative-led furniture exhibitions such as 2019's show ‘Love’ at New York’s R & Company. He has also successfully transferred his skills to costume and set design for operatic performance – his first foray being with Theater Basel’s staging of Rigoletto in 2023, for which he created a chic and slick set comprising three brightly painted curved walls – like abstract flower petals – that moved as the action unfolded and intensified.

Now, Yovanovitch has revealed the set design and costumes for a production of Le Nozze di Figaro by the Korea National Opera in Seoul.

Pierre Yovanovitch’s set and costume design for the Korea National Opera

Yovanovitch is a lifelong opera fan, and his passion for the medium resonates through his work and its attention to detail. A setting sun presides over the performance, tracking the passage of time as the ‘day of madness’ unfolds. The stage, set on a rotating platform, shifts between the Countess’s atelier and the Count’s house, offering clean-lined architectural vignettes in the round. A smooth, spiral tower and the imposing symmetry of the Count’s home draw on 1920s and 1930s modernist architecture – namely the stepped form of the ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat and the minimalist geometry of Villa Noailles - an aesthetic Yovanovitch hopes will resonate with younger, contemporary audiences.

Notably, this production marks his first creating costumes – a total of 53 – along with accessories, hairstyles, and makeup. Drawing on his eight-year tenure designing menswear for Pierre Cardin in the 1990s, he blended references to traditional Korean attire, such as traditional Korean knots and hanbok influences, with the sharp tailoring and silhouettes of 1920s–30s fashion.

'This project allowed me to expand my storytelling into new realms – beyond the set to costumes – and to reflect the witty intricacies of Le Nozze di Figaro through every visual detail,' says Yovanovitch, who meticulously tailored each look to reflect the contradictions and complexities of the characters. 'Everything seems simple in this opera, but in the end, all the characters are ambiguous. Love is everywhere, and melancholy more than meets the eye.'

The designer worked closely with director Vincent Huguet, with whom he also collaborated on Rigoletto at Theater Basel. For those curious to see where this creative partnership goes next, keep your lorgnettes at the ready: Yovanovitch and Huguet will reunite for Wagner's 'The Valkyrie', set to open later this year at the Rome Opera House. Encore!

Le Nozze di Figaro was staged by Korea National Opera at Seoul Arts Centre this March,

pierreyovanovitch.com
nationalopera.org.

From fibreglass taxi cabs mounted on a London storefront to a plane made from bread for Hermès, Shona Heath's fantastical set and production designs are defined by a surrealist sensibility that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

A fashion graduate from the University of Brighton, Heath began her career in costume design before branching out into window displays and set design for fashion designers. This shift led to her long-term collaboration with British fashion photographer Tim Walker, with her weird and wonderful creations gracing the pages of leading publications and shaping exhibitions, runways and campaigns for fashion powerhouses like Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dior, and Miu Miu.

In 2024 Heath’s star rose stratospherically: her work on Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things earned her both a BAFTA and an Academy Award for Best Production Design, and in December, she was named a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI). Wallpaper* caught up with Heath to reflect on these remarkable achievements, explore how she remains authentic in an increasingly homogenised industry, and find out what she has in store for 2025.

Wallpaper*: 2024 was an extraordinary year for you, with a BAFTA and Oscar win for Poor Things, and being named an RDI. What do awards and recognitions like this mean to you, both personally and professionally?

Shona Heath: Until this year, awards have never been something that crossed my path. I really had no desire for accolades. It’s a bit like when I got married – I thought it wouldn’t change anything from day to day, but it did. There is a feeling that is good. Professionally, I am excited that new projects are coming my way that really want me to show what I do to its fullest. I feel like I have been given a little boost of trust.

The recognition of my craft and the love, care, and energy I put into all the work I do does feel fantastic. I am always part of a group of people working in different disciplines to produce a piece of work – a film, a show, a photograph and it is reassuring that set design, costume, and production design are really seen and appreciated by people. That does make me feel validated, when I have always felt a bit like a charlatan, always doing something I haven’t done before.

I must admit, the BAFTA felt just great on home turf, the Oscar – one of the most surreal nights of my life – and the RDI made me feel a bit older. I was amongst two other fantastic designers who do something profoundly good for people: gardens and urban spaces for humans to find peace within. I do feel a bit like I am the one who just made some inedible cupcakes.

But I have been amazed and enlivened that so many people enjoy my work on a kind of 'importance of dreaming' level.

W*: You’ve mentioned that you now begin your creative process with words rather than images, due to the overwhelming visual stimuli in today’s world. Do platforms like Instagram disrupt your process, or can they be inspiring? How do you block out the noise?

SH: I use Instagram as a portfolio. I don’t read comments – I used to, but it actually felt weird, even the nice ones.

The internet is undeniably great for research. But I do find that if I start my creative process with intense thought, unusual narratives, words, and original stories, it helps to inform my own approach and boundaries before I dive into the visuals. This process helps with authenticity and gives me a clear path.

The time wasted on social media is immense. I don’t like being shown things that some algorithm assumes I would be into – it really pisses me off, and I’m super sensitive to it. As soon as I feel like somebody has worked me out, I want to switch it up.

W*: Your work on 'The Glass Hermit' marks your first foray into integrating AI with your analogue creative process. How did this experience challenge or enhance your usual approach to design, and what potential do you see for AI as a tool in future creative projects?

SH: It both challenged and enhanced simultaneously, which I think is a good thing.

It doesn’t change my approach to design, as AI does not 'design' in any interesting way or think like me. I am obsessed with craft and materials, and these details in my work will always inform the bigger picture.

There is a huge amount of physical waste that unfortunately goes hand in hand with set design. I will always be grounded in the physical. I don’t love computers, so I don’t want to spend any more time than necessary within them.

What I can imagine is being able to tell more ambitious stories with uncharted layers, where AI could somehow help reduce waste – both financial and physical. AI is only a tool. Everyone has access to an iPad, and the opportunity to create is widespread, but unless you have a reason, a truth, and dedication for what it is you are doing, you will always get lost in options, and the results will not be interesting. The same applies with AI.

W*: What has been the most challenging project or moment in the past year, and how has it shaped your perspective or approach?

SH: The Oscar. Sounds like a joke… but I found the competition aspect and public stage confronting, and the social side, however fun, exhausting.

I absolutely love what I do, and I wasn’t doing it for a good few months – too long. I find it an important ritual to output and physicalise my ideas; otherwise, it’s a jumble in there mentally!

When I get my next Oscar – ha ha! – I will get a personal stylist, a therapist, public speaking lessons, learn to meditate, and drink way more water. Maybe I need all of those things anyway!

I have a lot of empathy for people in the public eye, and I only had the tiniest crumb of what some folks have to endure. I am really, really happy to stay behind the camera.

W*: When considering new opportunities, what factors are most important to you in deciding which projects to take on?

SH: I have to feel like there’s a reason it’s me doing them – that I would be the best and only person for this role.

Working from my studio is important; it’s a place of great work and great people.

To be inspired and to know you’re going on a journey that will be captivating, cover new ground, and be creatively rewarding.

And a happy gang around you is everything. This project sounds perfect!

W*: As you look to the year ahead, are there any emerging themes, ideas, or projects you’re particularly excited to explore in your work?

SH: Yes, I want to bring to life some surreal stories I’ve written and have playing in my head. They are super short – like a film snack, visual poems.

I am also concepting a really out-there script for someone at the moment that I’m totally into, so I’m excited about that. It’s keeping my brain very busy.

I would love to weave music and dance into my world in an unknown visual way.

Each year the RSA puts out an open call for RDI nominations. For updates on 2025 nominations, follow @therdifaculty on Instagram. The RSA also hosts a series of open Summer Sessions – intergenerational gatherings where RDIs, emerging designers, scientists and engineers. can share, inspire and challenge.

royaldesignersforindustry.org

shonaheath.com

Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet Tour has become one of 2024’s most widely talked-about shows and not just because of the GRAMMY-nominated pop star at its helm. Like many artists in recent years, Carpenter and entertainment architects Stufish opted to bring the audience in, building a domestic world based on the layout of a penthouse apartment.

An elevated next step from Carpenter and Stufish’s celebrated Coachella 2024 collaboration, for which the architects built a pastel-blue motel exterior for the Pennsylvania singer, the immensely detailed and referentially kitsch bedroom, bathroom, living room and 1960s conversation pit made for images that have been shared and pored-over online: a successful stoking of the internet fandom that’s but one facet of the increasing trend.

Earlier this autumn, Stufish (the design team behind, among other projects, Madonna’s Celebration Tour, Take That’s This Life Tour and U2’s hugely ambitious residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere) also worked alongside English bedroom pop singer Rex Orange County to turn his stage into a Japanese-inspired room featuring rice paper panels and birch plywood surfaces. Last year, The 1975’s At Their Very Best Tour set the chart-topping indie band within their own two-level house replete with scaleable roof, while other musicians, from Taylor Swift to Lana Del Rey, have all played with unique takes on the theme over the last 12 months.

For Ric Lipson, a partner at Stufish and the lead on Carpenter’s tour brief, the idea began as a way to create a tangible experience less reliant on screens that also embraced and highlighted the singer’s unique, retro pin-up-influenced brand. 'In the last few years, set design for pop shows and rock shows has become so much about video screens and content and there’s nothing wrong with that – there’s some beautiful content out there – but we all spend all day looking at screens,' he begins. 'When you have an artist who has a real message or a real point of view, they can work well in these really scenic set-ups that are very restrictive in some ways.

'On a video screen, you can go from a forest to outer space to wherever, but when you’re in a house, you can’t really leave the house. So then [you start to play with what’s available],' he continues. 'At one point, she’s on a heart-shaped toilet crying about a boy, ripping up tissue paper with kiss marks on, throwing it into a clam shell sink. Every single detail there is set up to make the world we’re building uniquely Sabrina.'

Combining elements of midcentury modern design and incorporating vintage nods, from a 1960s Malm-inspired fireplace to 1950s TV cameras that follow the singer around the stage, creating a show-within-a-show format, Lipson worked alongside the artist and creative directors Sarah Carpenter (Sabrina's sister) and Dannah Gottlieb to really lean into this idea of world-building. There are elements, such as the heart-shaped second stage that sinks down into the conversation pit, that are designed to foster intimacy between performer and audience. 'A lot of penthouses in the 1970s would have them for people to sit around and chat in. There’s something comfortable about it being upholstered and soft,' Lipson explains. But as well as literally inviting her fans into her home, it also provides a theatrical framework for the show to operate within.

On The 1975’s tour, singer Matty Healy used the various sets within their house to enact dramatic, often controversial scenes that became some of the show’s most discussed moments. At one point he watches commercials before climbing into the TV set; at another, he performs a series of press-ups on the living room floor before gnawing on a piece of raw meat.

Designer Tobias Rylander told Wallpaper* at the time that the layout of the house was designed with these linking set-pieces in mind. ‘They wanted it to feel very natural and to have a flow on stage where we could tell a story,’ he says. ‘So, we then started to think about doors and windows, and these different platforms.’ Likewise, for Lipson, the framework of the penthouse allowed them to create a narrative for the show that had a distinct beginning, middle and end. The lighting echoes the story arc of the performance, showing 'a literal evening, starting before sunset, to a slumber party, going through cocktail hour, and then to a party'.

'We want to give [Sabrina] the architecture and geography to allow her to be her, and that allows for these intimate moments and grand moments to come out,' he explains.

Tailoring this idea to different environments, from stadium to indoor show to festival, is something that’s enabled a varying scale of interpretations to emerge even under the umbrella of on-stage domesticity. Swift’s global Eras Tour was a huge-scale production that saw creative director Ethan Tobman create a succession of home-like structures, from a doll’s house to a wooden shack, that echoed different tonal moments of the show; at one crescendo point, the main house structure burns down.

For her Reading and Leeds Festival headline sets in summer 2024, meanwhile, Del Rey performed inside a set designed to echo the architecture of an old glass house, inspired by the Villa Marina in Italy and London’s Barbican Conservatory. ‘We gave her a physical environment so she and her dancers could have levels and things to interact with that give purpose,’ explains Lipson. 'The conceit of it being in a house again grounded that performance in a really beautiful way.'

Playing in smaller theatre spaces, Rex Orange County’s stage design necessitated a more minimal, simple aesthetic for which the 'calm and serene qualities' of Japanese architecture were perfectly placed. 'The concept for “Finally” tour was a time-based show taking the audience through a calendar year,' explains designer Rachel Duncan. 'The artist wanted a framework that could seamlessly shift between the mundane and the surreal, which influenced our choices in crafting the interior and exterior elements.

'The layering of the set allows the space to feel contained and intimate,' she continues. 'The translucent window frames allow light and texture to permeate the space, giving the illusion of the world outside the box. The sliding panels can open to reveal the outside landscape imagery created with a digital backdrop. The combination of the scenic blossom lit within and above the main stage structure allows the monolithic sculpture of the stage design to be softened by the more organic form.'

At a time when artists are expected to give more of themselves online than ever, it makes sense that audiences also want this level of intimacy reflected from the stage too. But more than just a means of breaking the fourth wall and inviting people in, these structures are allowing performers to stage a story instead of just a pop show.

'Architecture isn’t just buildings; architecture is a manipulation of space. So for us, manipulating that space which is well known – everyone knows the size of a stage – is about creating something that is uniquely tailored to the artist,' says Lipson. 'Artists like Sabrina or Lana or Rex understand that there’s nothing wrong with the traditional way of making a show. But they also go, what if it was a little more scenic or narrative-driven so people feel like they’ve gone on an interesting journey?'

For his first-ever feature-length film in English, legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar creates a powerhouse pairing, with Tilda Swinton and former Wallpaper* Design Awards judge Julianne Moore playing the two leads. But there is a third star, the beautiful brutalist house that forms the backdrop to the majority of the movie.

The Room Next Door tells the story of a journalist dying of cancer who calls on an old friend to be with her when she ends her life (in the room next door). The two have not seen each other in a long time, but shift from Manhattan to a rented modernist house in upstate New York to prepare for death. The location house, Casa Szoke, is actually in Spain, located on the southern slope of Monte Abantos, near El Escorial, an hour’s drive from Madrid. Designed by Madrid-based studio Aranguren + Gallegos, who took inspiration from Le Corbusier’s box-like creations, it consists of a series of interconnected angular volumes in glass and corten steel, which nestle in a pine forest landscape.

We talked to the film’s Israeli-born, New York-based production designer Inbal Weinberg, whose previous work includes Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria. The sombre mood of the film, and the contemplative nature of its subject matter, was a guiding hand in the creation of the set design. ‘The connecting thread is Pedro's interest in elevated aesthetics,’ says Weinberg. ‘He has an innate sense of beauty and a particular appreciation for craft, which is apparent in every shot.’

The relocation to the upstate house marks the dawning of a new intimacy between the two women, with the site subtly setting the scene for the serious conversations to follow. ‘There's something about modernist homes that radiates calm, rationality, simplicity and appreciation for the environment. Specifically in our film, the idea of the space as a last respite, a place for both illness and healing, connected with the modernist sensitivity,’ says Weinberg. ‘With Casa Szoke, we appreciated the play between built volume, the human form, and nature. We liked the juxtaposition of linear planes and nature's curves, and the tension in the angular windows. The diagonal lines provided a sense of drama that highlighted the complex dynamics between the two characters, and the high stakes of their stay.’

Weinberg emphasises the importance of focusing on the people that inhabit the spaces within the films, of imagining their worlds. ‘As a production designer, you're constantly moving between a wide array of projects, from gritty realistic dramas to opulent period pieces to superhero blockbusters. You can't go wrong if you concentrate on the characters, and let them dictate their environments. We paid close attention to every prop. Pedro is very discerning when it comes to details, and he made sure that every piece of art, book and decorative element was curated. We had a rich mood board of references, from homes of real people that we met in New York to designers' pieces fresh from the latest design magazines. Pedro always lent his personal taste (and artefacts) as a finishing touch.’

The Room Next Door is on general release from 25 October 2024, warnerbros.com
Book at odeon.co.uk

Though Jonathan Lyndon Chase is best known for their charged figurative paintings and plush sculptures, the genesis point for their creative process isn’t dissimilar to that of many fashion designers. ‘My artistic practice usually starts with a drawing or a sketch and then it sort of ripples out and transforms from there,’ they share over email, a couple days out from the unveiling of their latest large-scale commission. The fashion comparison is particularly apt since the commission in question is for Acne Studios, with the multidisciplinary artist creating the set for the Swedish fashion brand’s show during Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025.

For the set, the artist has created an entirely new series of works, installed both within and on the exterior of a purpose-built box, set in the garden of L’Observatoire de Paris. Riffing on the abiding focuses of their artistic practice, the installation explores the complex relationships between domestic and public spaces, the contested status of Black queer bodies within them, and the imprints they leave as they pass through.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase for Acne Studios S/S 2025

‘What are some ways to create an atmosphere that’s related to private, public, and liminal moments?’ was the question Lyndon Chase asked themselves as a point of departure, noting their keenness to evoke ‘familiar things and people, but also reflect things and people that maybe a broader audience doesn’t see too often’.

Arranged around a central living room scene, fringed by a runway, the installation conjures an almost uncanny sense of intimacy, as if the objects on display had been lifted from a long-lived-in lounge. Vintage settees – sourced from LeBonCoin, the French online classifieds platform – are painted with scrawled numbers, frilled bows and queer Black figures in states of solitary rest, contemplation and raunchy embrace. Among them, plush, jaunty sculptures of cats, stereo systems, jewellery-pierced lampshades and busts of bearded heads stand atop pastel cubes; canvases – some patchworked from scraps of clothing fabrics – feature vignettes of exploding stoves, or are daubed with lurid yellow foam.

Indeed, the context displayed evokes a keen sense of familiarity, but the installation’s real effect lies in the almost eerie specificity of its content. ‘We accumulate all of these objects in our spaces, and they indicate a person's personality. I’m thinking about a body – and the idea of your body’s memory in public spaces. We don’t always get to see what is beneath,’ Lyndon Chase explains of the installation’s affective logic. ‘I’m trying to achieve something that is raw or honest. I want it to feel like and look like something, someone, and someplace real. People are complicated and messy and a person’s living space, I believe, says a lot about them.’

There’s an evident parallel to be drawn, then, with the common though inherently personal nature of fashion. Working in direct response to Jonny Johansson’s latest collection for Acne Studios, Lyndon Chase introduced nuances of dress in the works – ‘The figures are wearing dresses and bows,’ they note, ‘and also many of the fabrics are inspired by the collection as well.’ They’ve also responded to the collection’s material palette, in particular, its denims and satins, which serve as the canvases for a number of the set’s paintings. ‘It’s really cool to channel the materials and the collection into my painting and drawing language,’ they share.

Lyndon Chase’s greatest achievement here, though, is the frank and generous framing that the installation provides for the collection. It’s hard not to view the clothes in a light of tender humanity, prompting reflections on our own inner emotional landscapes and how we come to terms with and express them – whether through fashion, furniture or otherwise. ‘Many of the works are deceptively heavy; although they are soft pillows, looks can be deceiving. In some ways, I’m asking a question about what it’s like to be soft and to carry joy and memories of trauma at the same time; the delights and burdens of existing in a body,’ Lyndon Chase muses.

‘Being a person who lives with bipolar disorder, it has allowed me to really focus on the nuanced relationships to emotions and the body, and how they affect the space around you,’ they continue. ‘I would also like people to consider what they think of good or bad emotions. That can look different for everyone, but perhaps embracing that is necessary to help us understand the complexities of our emotions.’

Discover more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2025.

The announcement of Jeremy O Harris’ West End run of Slave Play was greeted with equal measures of glee and trepidation. What would London make of this controversial play that, while on Broadway, sparked debate to a level that a new play hasn’t done for years?

Since Slave Play’s debut in 2018, Harris has written art-world satirical melodrama Daddy, and co-produced smash hit, star-making series Euphoria. The sense of anarchy and the surreal level of realism common to all three projects is especially palpable in Slave Play, written while Harris was completing his master’s at Yale.

Slave Play review: ‘sex, relationships and power through the lens of race’

I enjoyed the play immensely, especially the way in which the writing radically seized permission to address power, sex, relationships and self-perception through the spectrum of race. The actors – a cast of eight, including Kit Harrington, Olivia Washington (daughter of Denzel), Fisayo Akinade, Aaron Heffernan, Chalia La Tour and Annie McNamara – clearly admire the work they are performing, and as a result put themselves in positions that felt like a gift.

Without giving away spoilers, hearing certain things said out loud can eradicate their power and I found the play hilarious, tender and very confronting, but in a way that I welcomed. For some people, it may be the entertainment equivalent of jumping into an iced plunge pool, and there are moments of extreme darkness wrapped in the masterful satire at play here. Against a background of millennial pop and indie favourites, there is a gentleness in the hard truths delivered by the cast over the play's two-hour duration, with no interval.

When the show’s set designer, Tony-winning Clint Ramos, read the script, he missed his train stop so he could keep reading.

'When I first read the play, which was in 2017, I think I was drawn to it not only because it broke so many taboos, but because it was talking about something that, as a man of colour and in an inter-racial relationship, really spoke to me and not only on a personal level; at least in America, and I think globally, it spoke to the zeitgeist,' he says. 'I called Robert (O’Hara) the director and unpacked what I was feeling when I initially read it, which was admiration, titillation, discomfort but also ultimately, excitement and how to craft a theatrical piece around what Jeremy had written. For me, the first impulse we have for every design is an emotional response, so a lot of those emotions guided me into the design itself.'

The play shatters taboos: it is at once hilarious and eviscerating and is a pleasantly disruptive, fresh and contemporary piece of writing. Parsing issues of race through ‘antebellum sex therapy’ creates an unavoidable intimacy and as the play takes us through the funny, the troubling, the dark and the violent, there is nowhere to hide.

The set design: mirrors open and tilt throughout

Slave Play’s greatness lies in its relationship with the audience. The set is built of mirrors, around which creeps the vegetation of the plantation it is set on. Throughout the action, the mirrors open and tilt, revealing the audience to itself, using the reflections of the actors and tessellating to accommodate the performance.

The idea was born out of a workaround of staging the production in the round, with the audience facing itself: 'The root of Jeremy's mandate was really that he wanted the audience to be immersed in the plantation, [to feel] that ephemeral thing that happens when you're in a place that has a history of oppression, that is real but [is also an idea around which there is] a spiritual envelope. Robert wanted the audience to be conscious of the performance. Seeing the actors while you're seeing the audience across for you was important to him.'

Ramos’ research led him to look at a lot of bedrooms, many of them with mirrored ceilings, and he began to think about intimacy and performance.

'I started playing around with mirrors, and then ultimately really landed on this idea… Why don't we just reflect ourselves onto it? And that also achieves what Jeremy was going for, which is because most of the audiences in the American theatre are white in a metaphorical way – we are already placing both the actors and the play itself in a plantation, in something that is charged, and which is basically a swathe of white people.'

From the pop-out beds, hidden drawers and lyrics from a Rihanna song hanging over the action, the set accentuates the play in a powerful way. This was due to a collaborative approach embraced by Ramos, O’Hara and Harris.

'Our collaboration started in 2018, with Robert and Jeremy and all the other designers and it hasn't really stopped. Once I had the envelope of these walls of mirrors, it was really about what do we need for each particular scene? And the pop-up ideas facilitated the ideas of the hidden doors and within that [the set] opens up into these little vignettes, as if we're presenting middle stages. Again, it ties into this idea of how sex is performed, both for our partners or for ourselves.'

Great theatre creates great conversation, and people have something to say about Slave Play. Many have found it very liberating, appreciating its voicing of things lurking for too long as elephants in rooms. Exposing these long-engrained tropes requires us to look at ourselves, helping us question fundamental elements of our lives and relationships.

Slave Play, London is at the Noël Coward theatre until 21 September 2024

slaveplaylondon.com

In David Rockwell’s Manhattan office, there is a room filled with dozens of models for the musical and theatre sets he has designed over the years. The shelves are lined with miniature worlds rendered at a half-inch scale: tiny cardboard cut-outs of the shoe factory in Kinky Boots; a remarkably realistic Streamline Moderne train carriage from the set of On the Twentieth Century; and matchbox-sized versions of the pool table that appeared in the production of The Nap. In the centre of the room stands a long table for meetings with directors and choreographers, and toward the back are the desks of the designers busily at work on new productions.

‘That room, for me, was like how you imagine Father Christmas’ workshop to be, filled with the most magical toys and gems that you’re ever going to find,’ says Simon Sladen, senior curator of modern and contemporary theatre and performance at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which has recently acquired the original set models for four David Rockwell-designed performances – the aforementioned productions, plus Hairspray. ‘When I first walked in, I was probably just a rage of jealousy that we would never be able to acquire all of those materials or have so many on display.’

David Rockwell standout stage sets

Rockwell, who launched his cross-disciplinary architecture and design practice in 1984 (and features in 2024’s Wallpaper* USA 400, a guide to creative America), has created more than 50 sets for plays and musicals, but the role of theatre in his work runs much deeper than any individual project; it’s integral to the way he thinks about architecture.

He doesn’t have a signature style, but he does have a signature ethos: to Rockwell, the core principles of theatre and good design overlap and involve the thoughtful consideration of narrative, movement, scale and intimacy in order to create memorable and empathetic experiences. Architects, after all, are builders of worlds, whether it’s the set for a performance dreamed up by a playwright or a hotel, office or restaurant. ‘Architecture and theatre are both defined by the people that inhabit and animate them,’ he writes in his 2021 book Drama.

‘We start by asking not how something is going to look, but how we want the audience to feel.’ Rockwell’s love of theatre – both real and metaphorical – predates his career as an architect. He was raised in suburban New Jersey, where his mother, a vaudeville dancer and choreographer, organised community theatre productions, and he participated in all aspects of them, from acting to playing in the orchestra and working on sets.

When he was 12, he visited New York City for the first time to see the original production of Fiddler on the Roof, after which he was hooked on Broadway. Soon after, his family moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, where he encountered a vibrant public life, particularly its restaurant scene

It’s no wonder, then, that his work has involved building spaces that foster conviviality. ‘There were things that connected those experiences, and one was a hunger and a love for live experience,’ says Rockwell. ‘And I felt very compelled by that.’

A continual feedback loop exists between his work for theatre and the rest of his creative practice. He thinks like a director when it comes to his hotels and restaurants, which include a 30-year collaboration with chef Nobu Matsuhisa and establishments for culinary heavyweights including Jean-Georges Vongerichten, José Andrés and Daní Garcia. Meanwhile, he thinks like an architect when it comes to sets, which is rare in the world of theatre.

There’s an element of realism to his designs and a keen awareness of movement that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Moreover, the audience is often let in on the scenic transitions that happen in a production he works on. For his Tony Award-winning set design for the 2016 production of She Loves Me, a musical set in a 1930s-era perfume shop in Budapest, Rockwell created an art nouveau-style building that opened like a jewel box.

‘Architects have a great visual and three-dimensional awareness of space, and not all theatrical designers work in that way,’ says Sladen. ‘They might work from a sketch of a visual picture or they might start with colour palettes. From the beginning, David is always thinking, “How is this going to work?”’

In Kinky Boots, a realistic-looking factory floor was transformed into a fantasy world using a change in lighting and by converting a conveyor belt into multiple moving treadmills on which the actors danced. ‘The models were critical for studying how things could rotate in space and how dance might integrate with that,’ says Rockwell. ‘You can’t really study it any other way than with a model; they don’t misrepresent the truth. In renderings, you can convince yourself of a lot of realities.’

Set models represent the private conversations between a stage designer and a production’s director, lighting designer, choreographer and costume designer. They are also kept on hand at rehearsals, allowing actors to build their characters, and are continually modified as they perfect their movement across the stage. Unlike models for buildings, which are designed to be displayed, set models are workhorses that the public never sees. Because of this, a model becomes ‘a little bit like the playbill’, Rockwell says. ‘It’s a collection of memories.’

Rockwell himself is a student of other theatre designers’ models, especially those of Boris Aronson, who designed the original set for Fiddler on the Roof. Aronson’s widow gifted Rockwell an original set model for the Tony-winning 1971 production of Company, which sits in his office. He’s also a frequent visitor to the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the few locations that publicly displays theatre set models. Sadly, few wind up in collections because they rarely survive due to their delicate nature.

The ephemerality of theatre makes the genre especially difficult to collect. But its material remnants, set models in particular, are particularly evocative objects. The V&A often hosts special tours for people with dementia, and its theatre collection is a favourite destination. ‘Visitors will see a set model or a costume or a poster for a musical and they’ll start singing,’ Sladen says. ‘They know the words perfectly because that memory is so strong.’

Rockwell appreciates that more people will now be able to see and experience the models he has made following their acquisition by the V&A. ‘I’m intrigued and honoured and terrified all at the same time because they’re objects I love having,’ he says. ‘It’s sort of a step in letting go of the object, keeping the memory, and then being part of this collective memory.’

rockwellgroup.comvam.ac.uk

This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available to download free when you sign up to our daily newsletter; in print on newsstands; on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS;and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

'Air Play Moon Safari' is the French band's latest tour, as they play their intimate, retro-futurist classic album, in full, from a five-sided, white-walled, 21:9 aspect-ratio letterbox that faces its voyeuristic audiences like Hitchcock’s Rear Window property as reimagined by Californian modernists. 'It could be a home, it could be our world, our head… our architectural concept,' they say of the project.

Air play Moon Safari: the White Box stage

Designed by lighting / art director partnership Antoine Jorel and Pierre Claude, the pantechnicon installation acknowledges the band’s long-standing, creatively synergistic relationship with buildings. Before music became his full-time concern, the duo’s guitar and keyboard player Nicolas Godin studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles. His father, Philippe Godin, also an architect, helped design Monaco’s Stade Louis II stadium (with French functionalist master Henri Pottier) and worked on Yamoussoukro, a new Ivory Coast capital city project commissioned by President Felix Houphouet-Boigny in the 1980s.

The dreamy instrumental 'Modular Mix' from Air's 1997 EP, ‘Premiers Symptômes’ was inspired by the work of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, while the compositions on Godin’s solo debut Concrete and Glass are described by the artist as 'square and parallel, very clean. Like a building.' Keyboardist and mathematics graduate Jean-Benoît Dunckel, meanwhile, cites Air’s greatest ever live performance as its 2016 show at Oscar Niemeyer’s UFO-shaped Amphithéâtre Coupole at Espace Neimeyer in Paris’s 19th arrondissement.

A recent show at the Jørn Utzon-designed Sydney Opera House comes a close second. For Air’s 2024 US and European tour, Godin and Dunckel’s creative team returned to architectural themes for visual reference. Playing with straight lines and white surfaces, compact, intensifying environments and James Turrell-esque light sculptures, a transportable, adjustable container of digital pyrotechnica was fabricated to encase the three live performers in a structure that echoes Richard Neutra’s Californian Stilt House or Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.

'It’s a light box. It looks a bit like the studio on the cover of 10 000 Hz's Legend,' says Dunckel referring to the desert architecture fantasy by Ito Morabito (aka designer Ora Ito) on the band’s 2001 album sleeve. 'The box represents a frame for the Air universe. Trapped in a box together we are more tight.' Musically and socially. 'We enjoy hardware,' adds Air’s Nicolas Godin. 'We like the simplicity of the white box. It concentrates the live experience. It’s like we are in the space shuttle.'

Having already worked with The Strokes, French indie band Phoenix and rapper Disiz, Antoine Jorel and Pierre Claude created a concept for Air based on jet-age minimalism; 'technically complex but visually simple', with accents of Stanley Kubrick’s white-clad, Korova milk bar denizens in A Clockwork Orange and the movie’s frequent, visual white-outs.

The box’s walls are an electrically opaqueable polycarbonate, the semi-transparent video ceiling is made from lacquered and reflective white metal, while its floor is covered with white mirror 'dance carpet'. Everything is designed to be within the frame; there are few visible cables or unsightly monitors and no conventional lighting rigs. A plastic film in front of the box’s screen can render the performing image crystal clear or dreamily blurry.

'As kids our influences were pop soundtracks and TV,' says Godin acknowledging the band’s atmospheric, cinematic sound on Moon Safari. 'We didn’t have a pop music experience like the British and Americans. Instead, we heard music through TV and movies, soundtracks and themes.

'The French had Debussy and Satie, then rock ‘n’ roll came along, with its verse / chorus pop songs.' This, he says with a smile and a Gallic shrug, ruined everything for France. 'We wanted to change that perception but we didn’t want to copy the English or Americans. We wanted to do something continental.'

To complement Moon Safari’s sound, Air also wanted a future-lounge visual aesthetic for the album cover, Godin steering US film-maker and artist Mike Mills towards the strip cartoons in Guy Debord’s cutting-edge Internationale Situationniste journal from the 1960s for inspiration.

Some 25 years after the debut’s original release, animated renderings of Mills’ illustrations – the two band members as sexy boys alongside spaceship quarterdecks, shooting stars and interstellar salons – now dazzle the lightbox walls during Air’s live shows.

The music of ‘Moon Safari’ is still vocoder galactic and intimate, its atmosphere smoky-Parisian and fin de siècle seductive. 'The set is an invitation to come into our world, our living room,' says Dunckel '…our bedroom, even?'

'Air Play Moon Safari' is on tour throughout 2024 in Europe, the USA and Mexico

airfrenchband.com

The Take That tour of 2024 is underway. ‘This Life on Tour’ features a set design by Stufish, which Wallpaper* experienced live at London’s O2 this week, created by the entertainment architects behind spectacles such as ABBA Arena, Madonna's Celebration Tour and U2 at the Las Vegas Sphere. Here, they harness ten-tonne kinetic staircases, a 20m bridge that swoops in above the crowd, a giant television, lifts, a spinning satellite stage, fire, water, paper and more to help tell the story of the band’s 30-year career, from the perspective of its three remaining members, Gary Barlow, Mark Owen, and Howard Donald.

Take That tour 2024: Stufish’s set design, from exploding TVs to curtains of rain

The inspiration for the set design came initially from the band, in particular Owen. Architect and Stufish partner Ric Lipson explains: ‘Mark was one of the band's driving forces on this project. He had this idea of stairs being important to the show. A lot of shows use stairs, it's not an unused trope, but the reason for them was the new album, This Life, which is [about] 50-something men looking back at their career, and the ups and downs.’

Adds Owen: ‘Our thoughts around the tour start from the moment that first note is written on the album. We start to visualise the stage and how the show will come alive.’ In this case, he built an early model. ‘Just after we’d announced the tour dates, I went to the shops for some cardboard to start playing around with stage ideas. We had already had several tour-related meetings by then, but I always need to physically see what it might look like to get my head around it.’

Continues Lipson: ‘They wanted to find a way of the stairs doing more than just being static. So Kim Gavin, longtime creative director for Take That, Mark and ourselves came up with this kinetic staircase idea, and the idea that time would pass by the stairs revolving.’

While Stufish has created ‘lots of staircases in our time – we did a staircase with Madonna and on the Eurovision Song Contest four years ago – we've never made a staircase that big, that is kinetic, and not two of them that then have to rotate and not hit each other.’ The architects set to work with their usual process and precision, starting with sketches, CAD, and Rhino 3D modelling software. ‘We visualise it, we automate it, we animate it so that we can see how it will all fit together,’ says Lipson. ‘We made a 3D-printed model that the director could use in rehearsal, to explore how he wants to do [things].’

The twin staircases – each 9.5m long x 4m wide x 3.5m high – move around during the performance, coming to rest at times side by side, angled apart, and back to back, forming both a physical space for the performance and an ever-transforming backdrop and topography thanks to built-in screens with a combined 2 million pixels.

The show opens with the staircases side by side, as one, backs to the audience, ‘like a cliff face’, as Lipson puts it, taking the form of a giant retro television set, which gradually splits apart, accompanied by a frenzy of flying confetti, to reveal both the stairs and the band, as they launch into ‘Keep Your Head Up’.

‘Each one is on a revolving mechanism,’ says the architect of the staircases. ‘There’s a very heavy-duty system that sits on the arena floor, and there's a column that goes up through the stage. It essentially holds these things floating in space, because the weight on the stage would cause a problem. Not only do the stairs rotate independently, they also track along a guide track. So they track, and they open and they can spin. [They can be] symmetrical, asymmetrical. And that’s all programmed through computer automation software.’

The stairs prove an apt device to narrate the story of the new album. Through the early part of the show, Lipson continues, ‘Take That do a lot of songs from the new album, which is all about being giants, being up and down, hating themselves some days, and so we go from the stairs being a mountain to being a valley to being a lawn, and this constant movement allows that to happen.’

Later the stairs, angled apart, create the set of a living room, a recording studio, and a TV studio, as the show follows its tale from Take That’s beginnings in 1980s Manchester as a quintet (with Robbie Williams and Jason Orange) to 1990s global success, break-up, and 2006 reformation as a three-piece.

The retro TV from the show’s opening recurs as a motif throughout the show; multiple, differently sized tellies appear across the 40m-wide x 8.4m-high, 5 million-pixel panoramic screen that backs the stage, each showing a different shot of the action, adding to the idea that this is a telling of Take That’s tale.

The performance and the set’s movements are choreographed to ensure Barlow, Owen and Donald are not in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ‘don’t get run over by the stairs’, notes Lipson. A safety rail pops out of the top of the stairs when needed and retracts back inside afterwards (so as not to ruin the aesthetics), as the band gamely dance up and down. ‘Down is good,’ quips Barlow, adding, ‘Whose idea were the stairs?’ as the trio sprawl in mock, or perhaps genuine, fatigue.

There are a lot more moving parts to the show – 50 axes of motion in total. They include automated risers that move the band’s accompanying musicians into wider or more intimate settings; moving lighting pods; and lifts that deliver the band into that giant TV set at the start, or directly to the top of the stairs at the back of the stage, and also bring a grand piano front of stage for Barlow.

‘We started rehearsing even earlier than usual on the stage,’ says Donald of the set’s complexity, ‘just because there are so many parts to this show to get used to. It’s a lot more complicated, so we’ve needed that extra time with the stage.’

Perhaps it’s helpful that Take That chose to perform this tour without their usual cast of backing dancers, stripping back to focus the story on themselves. ‘I’m enjoying that feeling of being more open and vulnerable. It immediately means we have to think about everything differently,’ says Owen. For Lipson, it marks a point of difference in the storytelling that sees the band shift from the typical pop show to ‘something that's very grown up and quite touching, at times, and very funny’.

Around two-thirds of the way through the show, a 20m bridge descends from the ceiling, directly above the audience – ‘It isn't necessarily an unusual technology, but it’s still amazing to see a 20m-long bridge drop down from the sky,’ says Lipson. It comes to rest, allowing the band to cross from the main stage to a circular satellite stage amid the crowd that rises, falls, spins and tilts as they sing and dance upon it, while an aerial view is broadcast on the main stage screen. The bridge ascends, later reappearing to return the trio whence they came.

‘And then there’s fire in the stairs,’ adds Lipson.

Ah yes, the fire. This spurts not just from the stage but from 72 controllable flame units within the steps of the staircases, including when the band are on them, during their cover version of ‘Relight my Fire’. The heat could be felt from 20 rows back.

Given that the show began with, and later repeats, several minutes’ worth of paper confetti, and also includes upward-spouting fountains of water, as well as a curtain of water across the front of the stage, there’s a lot that could go wrong.

The integration of the show’s various complexities was one of its main challenges for Lipson. ‘We have fountains, and water curtains, and that all drops water exactly where all the electrics are for the lift, and exactly where the stairs are. We built a bund underneath the stage to collect the water and recycle it. And then just to make it even worse, right at the beginning of the show, we decided to drop tonnes of paper confetti all over the stage, which of course could make paper maché in the wrong environment. So there are filters and things that have to cover up other things so that you don't let in the water. And then, of course, there’s fire. Everything that could happen on top of itself is happening on top of itself, and the challenge is how to code that in an order that doesn't end up in a complete mess.’

Asked if, with the ever-growing technological arsenal, artists approach Stufish for bigger, better and ever more spectacular effects, Lipson responds that ‘it depends on the artist’ and even then, ‘it might seem like an arms race – “we want the biggest dot dot dot” – but it never really is that and even if that's what they want, it's never really our MO. As designers, we're there to say, OK, if we're going to invent this new technology, or whatever it is, what is the story we're trying to tell? And how does it affect the audience?’

He emphasises that Stufish is interested in creating a connection between the performer and the audience in a physical space, and that in an era when ‘people are becoming visually saturated by video’ and can ‘make any image within five minutes with AI’, it’s the physical that can best help a performer push boundaries. ‘The ability to make something physical, that emotes something as part of live experience to the audience, is what artists are trying for.

‘As architects, we understand space, we understand physical, we understand narrative, how you navigate people through a space, and a stage design,’ he says. ‘What's great about a band like Take That is that they are interested in that physical embodiment of a show that gives them something they can choreograph [around], be within […] a feeling that they're part of this live architecture.’

Gary Barlow: ‘how we make our audience go “wow”’

Barlow’s reflection on the inspiration process for this show underlines the band’s desire to reach and affect their audience. ‘Honestly, some of the conversations we have had are ridiculous. Like, “Shall we have a line of fire across the stage?” “‘Ooh yeah.” “What about huge fountains of water?” “Definitely.” The reality is that the three of us are sitting here dreaming about how we make our audience go “wow”, put their hands in the air and feel like they’re in another world.’

On Sunday night, as 16,000 people in the O2 waved their phone lights and sang along to ‘Rule the World’ at the show’s end, it felt like job done, Stufish and Take That.

stufish.com

For This Life on Tour dates and information, go to takethat.com/this-life-on-tour

‘Vanya was finding a way of creating a space that held the essence of the person, the singular person on stage, the strange endeavour of doing it,’ says Rosanna Vize, the designer who brought the Chekhov play Uncle Vanya to life on stage in its most recent Duke of York's theatre, London, iteration. ‘You’re bringing a kind of subtle magic within it that you just don't know is going to work. You just have to throw things at the wall and see if they stick.’

Following a five-week run at the Duke of York's, NT Live has now released Vanya at cinemas worldwide, with the one-man show placing actor Andrew Scott at the centre of Vize’s understated, provincial world. Directed by Sam Yates and adapted by Simon Stephens, the show sees Scott portray every character with a raw, often unsettling, empathy.  

Taking Vanya’s set design from stage to film

For Vize, the challenge of the set design was in maintaining the intimacy cultivated on stage for the big screen. ‘What was extraordinary about working with NT Live is that they really preserve the very thing that you made in tech and in previews. You expect that there's going to be this huge list of things to change, with things being too bright or overexposed. But scenically, the only huge change was that Andrew has to really keep an eye on not showing his Smirnoff Ice to the camera.’

Lighting, too, was faithfully reproduced for the cameras, with the requirements of the stage translated to the screen, becoming a sharp foil for the muted colour palette of the set. ‘So much of what we were trying to make dramaturgically and tonally was held in colour,’ Vize adds. ‘I think whilst the playful intricacies of the characters should and will develop all the time, [the set] relates back to what Chekhov is always doing, which is creating this real sense of gentle melancholy. You have to hold on to it when you're working with [this] kind of text to stop it becoming saccharin or pointless, I think. A lot of the time, when you translate these sorts of theatre productions to film, everything feels really warm, for example, and you lose all of that very subtle detail, but it doesn’t feel like that here, which is a lovely thing.’ 

NT Live: Vanya is at cinemas worldwide. Find your nearest screening at: ntlive.com

The house of Prada, currently under the creative direction of Miuccia Prada and Belgian designer Raf Simons, stands distinct in the landscape of fashion. Its style is characterised by a dual narrative: on one side, Prada embodies a timeless elegance rooted in sophisticated cultural references, such as Italian neorealism. On the other, it boldly ventures into cutting-edge modernity, bravely skirting the edges of banality.

A Prada fashion show is the prime setting for observing these narratives, particularly when they take on the language of architecture. Here, we are granted a view of how the future of fashion might materialise. Since Miuccia Prada introduced her first womenswear line for the family-owned business in 1988, these runway shows have proved a benchmark to gauge the zeitgeist.

Prada’s show sets have become intrinsic to the presentation of the house’s collections. They are designed by the Rotterdam-based OMA/AMO, led by the eminent Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. This collaboration is the most enduring of its kind, bridging the worlds of architecture and fashion for 25 years. It has revolutionised the fashion show as spectacle and pushed the boundaries of what is expected from a runway presentation.

25 years of OMA/AMO and Prada’s extraordinary runway sets

The collaboration began in 1999 when Prada approached OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) with a request to design its New York store. This marked the active start of AMO (OMA in reverse), the research arm of the practice, dedicated to applying architectural thinking to various disciplines. Initially, AMO’s role primarily involved experimenting with content creation and video production, showcasing a new architectonical ability to enhance the Prada brand through various mediums. With the S/S 2004 fashion show, though, AMO focused exclusively on the set design, which was then regularly staged in an industrial space at the Prada HQ on Milan’s via Fogazzaro. The practice has been collaborating with Miuccia Prada – and later, with Raf Simons – on the show sets ever since.

This season’s sets were particularly striking. For the men’s and women’s S/S 2024 show set, which featured a dripping wall of slime, the architects successfully straddled a difficult line. They not only transformed the set into a space that spoke to the social-media moment but maintained the essence of experimentation with physical space. The achievement marks a unique fusion of digital-age aesthetics with the tangible aspects of architectural design, appealing to a modern, tech-savvy audience while preserving the authenticity of spatial exploration.

With the opening of the OMA-designed Fondazione Prada’s Torre in 2018 – part of the foundation’s new location in Largo Isarco in the south of Milan – Prada’s fashion shows found their new home in Deposito, a vast industrial space on its ground floor. En route there for the A/W 2018 womenswear show, I chatted with my taxi driver, pointing out the neon lights that Prada and AMO had erected on the skyline that season. The driver shook his head: ‘No, signora, non è Prada, è un lunapark!’ (‘No, ma’am, it’s not Prada, it’s an amusement park!’). His confusion reminded me of Koolhaas’ words in his 1978 book Delirious New York, where he stated that ‘Luna Park [in Coney Island] is the first manifestation of a curse which is to haunt the architectural profession for the rest of its life, the formula: technology + cardboard (or any other flimsy material) = reality.’

‘What has always interested me is whether we could find ways to experiment, and to experiment with architectural transformation,’ says Koolhaas when I ask him why he believes the collaboration with Prada has been so lasting. ‘A lot of our work together has been connected to an interest in generating transformation through the know-how of fashion. For instance, if you take the ceiling that moves up and down [as was the case at Prada’s A/W 2023 men’s and womenswear show sets], if you were to do it as an architect, it would take at least a year and a half to engineer, and it would cost at least €3 million at that scale.

‘What is fascinating [about collaborating with a] fashion mentality is that it takes maybe three weeks, and is done not using metal and steel but foam and Velcro, yet the effect is the same. For us, it’s really interesting for us to use fashion tools to experiment with architecture.’

Reflecting on the formula learned from Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s first enclosed theme parks, Koolhaas says: ‘In my early writings about New York, my focus extended beyond just the phenomenon itself; I aimed to understand the early effects of technology on communities and on reality. This early realisation has always stayed with me.

‘But it’s important to emphasise that none of the work we’ve accomplished with Prada would have been possible without a dedicated team. It requires an extensive team effort, and often, changing team dynamics is crucial to keep the project’s intelligence alive. We work with a mix of consistent elements – you could call it a formula – and an endless array of variations. These variations come from our partners, the teams themselves, and the people who work on the project. This is why Giulio is here with us today.’

Giulio Margheri, associate architect at OMA, joined the Prada project team at AMO for the house’s S/S 2016 show. Margheri tells me that AMO never starts with a conventional brief. Instead, the process begins with distinct, sometimes seemingly unrelated words. It’s a deeply involved and interactive journey, typically necessitating around six discussions between the AMO and Prada teams. These dialogues guide AMO’s work by fostering an understanding of the overarching mood or critical elements that might influence the collection. This is then translated into a unique expression, explored in architectural drawings, visualisations, and physical models.

‘There is never one direction we work, but several, and it is a constant,’ Margheri adds. ‘It’s also a response to what is happening in the outside world, or to the political situation. This conversation is always a challenge on both sides. It’s interesting, sometimes when we discuss a show, we at AMO might refer to, let’s say, the “yellow curtains” show (S/S 2021), while the Prada team might refer to the “banana pattern” (S/S 2011). This illustrates that we operate with two different reference systems simultaneously – architecture and fashion.’ Asked for the words for S/S 2024, Giulio responds with ‘organic minimalism’.

Koolhaas dislikes being asked about his or AMO’s contribution to fashion. In his own words: ‘I’m nervous about discussing my work or our influence in such terms. I aim to maintain freedom. Dwelling on this could become a significant burden. Our office strives to explore any direction without being tied down by these heavy considerations, as it could restrict our freedom.’

After pausing, he continues: ‘One aspect I can acknowledge is our demonstration of long-term engagement in fashion, an industry typically known for short-term partnerships. This might be the most intriguing aspect and perhaps why we’re discussing this now. Our collaboration covers a broad spectrum of contrasting approaches, yet they all stem from the same source. From the start, there was an almost automatic understanding of our mutual ambitions and aesthetics with Prada. We instinctively embraced Prada’s ambitions to challenge convention, to work with concepts of ugliness, and to experiment with uniforms and uniformity.’

In line with Koolhaas’ formula in Delirious New York, the collaboration between Prada and OMA/AMO shows that shaping the reality of architecture and the future of fashion through runway shows involves more than just technology and simple materials; it’s fundamentally driven by a continuous hunger for knowledge and innovation.

A/W 2021

For the Prada A/W 2021 show (featuring the first menswear collaboration by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons), AMO created a colourful set designed to be broadcast rather than experienced by a live audience. The models navigated an interior of faux fur and marble planes, with the camera closely following them. This led Koolhaas to coin the term ‘close-up from the back’, a rare instance of an architect creating terminology that was later adopted by the fashion industry

S/S 2024

For the S/S 2024 men’s and womenswear set, AMO focused on the idea of ‘organic minimalism’. Walking alongside a cascade of pink slime (having shifted from the green of the menswear show), the models at Prada’s S/S 2024 womenswear show wore dresses in hues of white, pink, light blue, light green, and brown, complementing the salmon-pink set and creating a satisfying visual spectacle in which the fashion and the architectural framework merged seamlessly.

‘That was indeed stunning,’ says Koolhaas. ‘There was no brief provided about the dress that transforms [in] the space. But I do think that sometimes the set influences what they’re doing. There’s a resonance between the fashion and the design of the space, which is based on a conversation, where these elements materialise in different forms later [on]. For us, it is always exciting to see the final show – not just the space itself but seeing who is inhabiting it.’ 

The slime concept for S/S 2024 introduced fluid architectural elements, something that contrasted with the mechanical rising ceiling used for the A/W 2023 set and somehow felt less industrial, harsh or threatening. This reflects a common trend in the Prada and AMO collaboration – a new set often reacts to the previous one.

A/W 2023

For this show, the focus on the ceilings highlighted a significant architectural ambition. Margheri emphasises the desire for a space that initially seems unchanged, but where introducing just one element can lead to a radical transformation. Here, a ceiling rose as the show progressed, eventually revealing enormous hanging art deco chandeliers (for the men’s show) and columns of sweetly fragranced lilies (for the women’s show). This strategy utilised the height of the Deposito, demonstrating the role of architecture as an engineering discipline to redefine a space.

A/W 2022

For this cinema and sci-fi inspired menswear show, OMA transformed the Deposito into a theatrical space featuring seats from the nearby Cinema Fondazione Prada and a recreation of its iconic olive green carpet. But the spotlight was firmly on the models (including Hollywood actors Kyle MacLachlan and Jeff Goldblum) who emerged and disappeared from tunnels illuminated by bright blue neon lights and lined with metal grating. The resulting scenes echoed a mix of cinematographic references, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to Twin Peaks.

S/S 2021

Thanks to their previous spatial experiments, the traditional catwalk had already begun to lose its role as the main principle in Prada’s fashion spaces well before the pandemic. However, the digital presentation of Prada and Simons’ first collaborative womenswear collection, S/S 2021, was markedly different.

‘I would use the metaphor of a film studio because, without any kind of public, we became much more experimental and aware of the camera,’ Koolhaas explains. ‘The freedom of movement that the camera suggested meant that the camera alone became very prominent and present in the show itself. It became a new actor. Since that moment, our approach, even when the public is present, is a lot more about filming and mobility. This change was partly due to Covid but also partly due to Raf Simons’ co-creative direction with Miuccia Prada, who was interested in pursuing that direction. So, the set became a merger of the previous and the upcoming.

S/S 2023

The exploration of height in the Deposito began with the S/S 2023 set, which is a perfect example of the strength of the collaboration. It combined Rem Koolhaas’ intellectually driven architectural philosophy with Prada and Simons’ unique approach to fusing contrasting elements via novel combinations. ‘The Paper House’ – a paper mock-up executed from rolls of regular paper suspended from 10m-high ceilings (white paper for the men’s show, black for the women’s)– served as a subtle tribute to ‘paper architecture’, embodying visionary, yet often unrealised, architectural concepts. More than a mere fashion space, it was a manifestation of architectural imagination and theory.

A version of this article appears in the March 2024 Style Issue of Wallpaper* available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

prada.com
oma.com

The BAFTA 2024 Film Awards returned to The Royal Festival Hall in London on 18 February, with a sparkling stage design that dutifully matched the glamour of the evening – where Oppenheimer and Poor Things were among the winners. The ceremony, hosted by David Tennant, celebrated the best of the past year’s films, with awards and speeches delivered on a stage designed by Yellow Studio (also behind Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast set, featured in our pick of stage architecture).

Discover the BAFTA 2024 stage design by Yellow Studio

The New York design studio orchestrated a set featuring an 8m-high zoetrope installation, allowing for an optimum view from all angles for the 77th awards ceremony. Studio founder Julio Himede crafted the set to pay tribute to the BAFTA mask, a symbol of excellence in the arts since its debut in 1955.

Twelve golden mask silhouettes were arranged in a semi-circle, to create an illusion of motion. Delving into the history of animation, Yellow Studio gathered inspiration from early devices such as the phenakistoscopemand zoetrope (the first form of moving image, using a series of stills, that paved the way for future motion pictures and the film industry). The result was a stage installation that paid tribute to the BAFTA mask while honouring the history of filmmaking.

Having previously worked on the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, and the 2024 Grammy Awards, Yellow Studio effortlessly worked to scale. Nodding to the fundamental features of filmmaking, such as movement and lighting, the installation formed a beautiful frame for the ceremony's winners. LED lights further highlighted the stage's silhouettes, against a backdrop of sheer drapes.

‘I am thrilled and honoured to introduce Yellow Studio's contemporary and bold sculptural approach to the prestigious BAFTA stage,' said Himede. 'Our design pays tribute to an exceptionally talented group of creatives, and being part of this endeavour is a true privilege.’

yellowstudio.com
bafta.org

The classically inspired proportions of Auguste Perret’s 1939-built Palais d'Iéna in Paris – ‘a hymn to concrete’, as it has been described – were the starting point for Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria’s latest project, a video work that provided the backdrop for the Miu Miu S/S 2024 collection shown during Paris Fashion Week S/S 2024 earlier this week. The rationalist building, which now houses the French government’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council, has been the venue for Miu Miu’s shows for several years, transformed by the Italian house season on season.

‘The space of Palais d’Iéna was the starting point – I often start projects by thinking through the architecture,’ Al-Maria tells Wallpaper*. ’Classical brutalism was a wild concept to me – I wanted to make the classical brutalist space even more surreal and multiply the dimensions the audience could view the show within.’

Artist Sophia Al-Maria for Miu Miu S/S 2024

As such, interspersed between the space’s various columns, a series of screens showed Al-Maria’s latest work both prior to the show – a moody cloud-filled sky, suggesting an approaching storm – and during the show itself, where images swerved from a samurai sword-wielding female protagonist to strange, futuristic versions of the Palais’ pillars. The accompanying notes described the film’s setting as ‘a landscape of technological ruins, an imaginary history invented inside the Palais d’Iéna’.

Al-Maria said she first got involved with the project – one of several recent ‘interventions’ of the Miu Miu show space by contemporary artists – after her work was displayed as part of the 2023 exhibition ‘Everybody Talks About the Weather’ at Fondazione Prada’s Venice outpost. Titled The Future Was Desert, her film featured ‘delirious, post-apocalyptic dreamscapes’ set amid the Gulf Region and explored themes of environmental devastation, fossil-fuel dependency and the geopolitical complexities of the region.

‘I knew we had shared interests in human history and deep time,’ says Al-Maria of her affinity with Mrs Prada’s work. ‘There is a theme of questioning what is real and what is not, and in response to this extremely real experience of questioning the present moment, I wrote a sort of ”episode recap” of a fairytale about this [idea].’

As such, the film, titled Gravity & Grace, is described by the house as ‘an old story with a new twist... a fairy tale ending (of the world) about a court jester and a royal guard who can’t agree if life is a tragedy or comedy’. Both characters (‘archetypal twins’) are played by stunt woman Ayesha Hussain, fighting with swords and crossbows in what Al-Maria calls ‘an epic battle over POV’. A soundtrack is with an original piece by Melbourne-based band Divide and Dissolve, arranged by Asma Maaroof, Daniel Pineda and Joshua Fay.

As for the film’s link with the collection itself – which saw Mrs Prada explore ‘a rationale of beauty today... exploding, redressing’ – Al-Maria describes ‘a serendipitous symmetry‘, despite not seeing the full collection prior to creating the film. ‘I was transported when I saw a few of the looks. It felt as if a sensation that I have felt in the air around experiencing the present moment was suddenly embodied and enrobed in [the pieces].’

The S/S 2024 collection was a typically intriguing collection from Mrs Prada, who said she was inspired by ’radically expanding’ notions of beauty. ‘Instead of rigid paradigms, there is a radical expansion, a rich plurality,’ explained the collection notes. ‘Not beauty, but beauties, an embracing of unique characters, the joy of life.’ Looks let moments of glamour clash with the everyday: a golden brocade dress sat over a simple sweater and shirt, a lace petticoat with a blazer. Elsewhere, recent signatures of the house – abbreviated mini skirts, exposed logoed waistbands, elements of sportswear – continued to be riffed upon by the designer.

‘The surreal mixed with the quotidian,’ says Al-Maria of what Miu Miu encapsulates for her. ‘The everyday with a twist.’

miumiu.com

Las Vegas wants to reclaim its title as the heavyweight entertainment capital of the planet. In the ring is the Sphere (officially known as The Sphere at The Venetian Resort), a $2.3 billion venue developed by the Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. Capable of housing 18,600 people, the structure was designed by Populous Architects and is envisaged as the first of a series of new generation venues to be built around the world (the second, planned for London’s Stratford, is currently on hold).

Over a five-year development process, MSG Sports’ team has hunted far and wide for content creators that can showcase the Sphere’s audio-visual scale and quality. The job of inaugurating this technical wonder has been taken up by U2, the Irish band with unrivalled experience of elaborate staging to accompany their epic soundscapes. Willie Williams, a longtime U2 collaborator, was tasked with shaping the show, U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, which will run 29 September – 16 December 2023 (read our U2 in Las Vegas review). 

The making of U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere

‘Nothing like this has ever existed before,’ Williams tells us from the midst of last-minute preparations for the opening night. ‘It’s the confluence of art, science and diplomacy,’ he adds, hinting at the huge number of moving parts – both human and mechanical – needed to get the event off the ground. 

For Williams, massive complexity has been a large part of his professional life. The first U2 show he worked on was the ‘War’ tour in 1983, and since then he has overseen 11 major global tours, pioneering many aspects of the modern stadium spectacle along the way, from the brooding atmospherics of the original Joshua Tree tour in 1987 through to the eerily prescient collision of imagery that served as the backdrop to the Zoo TV Tour, which wended its way around the world from 1992 to 1993. 

‘I won’t lie to you,’ the designer admits, ‘I wasn’t enthusiastic initially when the premise came up.’ The opportunity arose when Bono heard advance word of the Sphere’s construction and the potential for a set shaped around Achtung Baby’s 30th anniversary coalesced with the idea of not taking a huge and complex machine out on the road in the post-Covid era. Nevertheless, the U2 team has been up against the building’s stalled completion programme, as well as the need for the space to accommodate the other premiere attraction, Darren Aronofsky’s immersive cinematic experience Postcard From Earth, which opens on 6 October. Everything about the show started from an unknown. 

This was a perfect match for the band’s finely honed ethos. ‘The technology has ebbed and flowed over the years,’ Williams says, ‘but U2’s vision has always been about pioneering – occupying space that no one else has thought of.’ It has been a long road to the stage of the Sphere, a journey not without its creative difficulties. ‘It wasn’t until around February that Edge said we’d cracked the code,’ recalls Williams, as the creative team initially struggled with a space that was both a constraint – no corners – and also a literal blank canvas. 

Characterised by a 90m tall circular exterior, covered in an LED screen, the Sphere contains a steeply raked auditorium, with the focal stage enveloped with a wraparound screen. Billed as the largest LED screen in the world, it comprises 268,435,456 pixels, the equivalent of 72 HD televisions. As the press pack points out, ‘every minute of content produced for Sphere is the equivalent of one hour of streaming television’. 

‘The quantity of data is mind-boggling,’ Williams confirms. ‘It means we’re effectively working at a 12K screen resolution (the Aronofsky film is at 16K), and each single frame of animation took around 15 minutes to render.’ It’s a far cry from the world of 1997’s PopMart, when Williams and his team oversaw the world's then-largest LED screen, a 50m structure that stretched the full width of the stage. 

Throughout U2’s performance history, screens have been both backdrop and structure, a three-dimensional canvas through which the audience experiences the music and imagery. Over the years, that imagery has been conjured up by a number of significant creative collaborators, including Brian Eno, Kevin Godley and Anton Corbijn. There was also a long-running partnership with the late architect Mark Fisher, who gave shape, structure and colour to these multimedia spectaculars, and whose company, Stufish (behind ABBA Arena), continues to play a major role. Starting with the Experience + Innocence Tour in 2015, the artist and stage designer Es Devlin has also been a key player in U2's creative arsenal.

For U2:UV, Achtung Baby Live at Sphere, the roster expanded still further, with a section overseen by the masters of cinematic illusion, Industrial Light and Magic. There’s also input from Eno, once again, along with installations by video artists Marco Brambilla and John Gerrard and a specially commissioned piece by Devlin. The starting point for the show is the 1991 album. ‘With [2017’s] Joshua Tree Tour, I was very surprised they wanted to do an album-based show,’ Williams recalls, ‘but the band looked at it as if it was an all-new album, while Anton made all the films. There was absolutely nothing nostalgic about it.’ 

A similar approach has been taken in Las Vegas. Achtung Baby has aged well. Marking the end of the band’s rootsy, rock’n’roll imperialism phase, it dived into new technologies, both sonically and visually, helping define the first decade of full-on media overload and global disruption – the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, the rise of the information age.

The accompanying tour, Zoo TV, with its suspended Trabants and scattered screens showing live and pre-recorded footage, was a deliberate bombardment of imagery, created in collaboration with Eno, artists Mark Pellington and Catherine Owens and others. Some of that unique imagery will resurface. ‘Initially, I didn’t think we’d revisit the Zoo TV era, because in the past 30 years, the entire world has gone that way,’ says Williams, ‘but the visual language still felt thrilling and fresh.’

Even working with the new sound system required a departure from convention. Built by German AV specialist Holoplot (who also worked on David Hockney’s Lightroom installation in London), the system consists of a vast matrix of speakers – 167,000 in total – seamlessly integrated behind the screen. ‘Even when Bono is talking from the stage it feels very conversational,’ Williams says, ‘it’s a very different sonic experience, very precise.’ 

U2’s longstanding sound designer Joe O’Herlihy has been closely involved with translating the ‘sonically dense’ Achtung Baby mixes into this new audio environment. Even producer Steve Lillywhite, a longtime U2 collaborator, was on board to advise. ‘An early decision that I made that really saved me was to bring everybody here,’ Williams says, pointing out that practically his entire team temporarily relocated to Las Vegas. 

The show is broken into three parts, starting with Achtung Baby, then on to songs taken from this year’s Songs of Surrender album, which features revisited and reworked tracks from the band’s copious discography. For this section, the physical stage setting comes into itself. A scaled-up version of Brian Eno’s Turntable, a fully-function deck originally shown at Paul Stolper Gallery in London, it promises a unique light show. ‘It almost started as a joke, but we quickly realised it would be brilliant,’ says Williams. Just like the original, the stage Turntable cycles through an ever-changing series of ‘colourscapes’, generated by an algorithm. 

The final section dips into the most richly anthemic seam of U2’s back catalogue. ‘Es has made a couple of wonderful pieces to close the show, and there’s work by John Gerrard and ILM as well,’ he says. ‘The building is a canvas we’ve been given, so we have to use it. So we don’t just deliver fireworks, we blow up the whole building.’ In this section, the full cinematic potential of the Sphere is unleashed. ‘It would be rude not to,’ Williams concedes. ‘Although simple graphics work really well, you can completely shapeshift the room.’

For the band themselves, this run of shows offered an opportunity to broaden and strengthen long-running creative partnerships. ‘We were looking around for a way of memorialising and celebrating Achtung Baby,’ says Adam Clayton, who started U2 with schoolfriends Paul Hewson (aka Bono), David Evans (the Edge), and Larry Mullen Jr in 1976. ‘Zoo TV had predated reality TV, fake news, social media – all these things. Bono had heard about this new venue in Vegas with nearly 20,000 seats, custom sound and an incredible screen that was akin to the whole audience having a VR experience. In the post-Covid era, it was appealing not to have to travel every night.’ 

After assembling the U2 family, work began on how to bring the space to life. ‘We’d had demos of the immersion, but there was still around eight months of pre-production work before we could even get in the building,’ Clayton adds, explaining that the Sphere’s bespoke acoustic design posed a number of challenges. ‘You don’t have to be very loud,’ he explains. ‘Whereas it’s much more broad strokes in an arena. As a result, I found I had to concentrate much more – I really have to lock in. You can practically hear the musicians think, and I think we’re playing better as a band [as a result].’ Ultimately, Clayton acknowledges that this is an experiment, but a worthy one. ‘It’s a new way of experiencing music, especially for the younger fans.’ 

This sense of the rock show as a grand ritual rings especially true for Es Devlin. This year marks ten years of the artist and stage designer’s collaboration with the band, starting with work on what became the Experience + Innocence Tour. For Devlin, whose work spans a vast spectrum from pure pop spectacle to land art, sculpture, installation (including Come Home Again at Tate Modern in 2022), fashion and theatre, one of the first things to celebrate is helping to launch Sphere onto the world stage. ‘It’s quite a privilege to be inaugurating a building,’ she says. ‘It’s quite a sacred thing.’ (The following week she flies to Manchester to oversee a piece inaugurating OMA’s Factory International.)  

In the long run-up to the show, Devlin and the rest of creative team – ‘a really tight-knit group’ – began by brainstorming visual concepts of how to treat the space. Devlin admits that she knew a fair bit about the Sphere in advance, noting that ‘every UK and American creative team had been invited to have a look at it – everybody has been sharpening their minds for this space’.  The vision that took shape takes the audience on a journey through materiality and light and shadow, exploring the limits of what the screen could make possible. 

‘We considered the show to be a little bit like a group art show,’ Devlin says, at pains to point out that although U2 acts as a catalyst, creativity is never imposed. ‘When you have a band as confident in their craft and purpose and status as they are, they’re just so profoundly unthreatened,’ she says. ‘It means they are genuine collaborators who have spent many years engaged with culture. They truly value the work of the artists they engage with.’

‘The amount of trust the band has put in me is incredible,’ Willie Williams admits. ‘It has felt like we’ve had to do the biggest art project in the history of our species whilst running a three-legged obstacle course.’ For Williams, the relationship with U2 continues to push his creative buttons, even if the route and destination have been unconventional. ‘This is someone else’s video surface and we’ll be followed by countless others. I’m just used to starting with hardware,’ he adds. ‘It’ll be a learning curve to see how humans respond to this unique situation – it’s a real dance between intimacy and spectacle.’ 

Alongside new iterations of John Gerrard’s series of 'flags', art contributions include Devlin’s ‘Nevada Ark’, a kaleidoscopically dense animated catalogue of the state’s threatened species. There’s also Brambilla’s ‘playful, kitsch’ piece ‘King Size’, which accompanies the song ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’. Brambilla’s contribution evolved from an AR project that used AI-generated Elvises, a familiar Vegas touch point. 

‘Elvis’ rise and fall mirrors the rise and fall of America, in a way,’ Clayton muses, before adding that if there’s one theme that runs through the entire show, it’s the relationship between the consumer economy and climate change. ‘It’s not obvious or straightforward,’ says Clayton, ‘but the art and artists have created a narrative that embodies the idea of community. We’re all part of the problem and the solution.’ 

The Sphere itself could be read as a symbol of the post-capitalist panopticon, a literal screen on which to project our hopes and fears. Devlin, for one, is sanguine about the resources expended to create the venue and the show, explaining that sustainability is about preserving the spaces and rituals that are most precious. ‘I want to sustain the kind of life where we can all gather together and sing,’ she says, describing the artist as a conduit for communal emotional experiences or rituals. Is the Sphere a modern cathedral? ‘I could see a return to a form of regular communal weekly gathering,’ she says. ‘We need it like we need air. Urgently.’

We ask Clayton if the band ever stops to consider its cultural legacy. ‘Yes. We’ve always had very involved creative people around us,’ he replies. ‘For example, Brian Eno had a huge influence on the band, from The Unforgettable Fire onwards. We very much trust our creative department. I’m happy to report that all the gambles and rolls of the dice have paid off.’ 

Jonathan Bell has since attended the show's opening night – read his U2 in Las Vegas review.

U2:UV Achtung Baby Live At Sphere, 29 September – 16 December 2023, TheSphereVegas.com, VenetianLasVegas.com

U2.com, WillieWilliams.com, EsDevlin.com, MarcoBrambilla.com, 

STUFISH.com, HOLOPLOT.com

As Loyle Carner headlines at Reading Festival 2023, one of the UK’s biggest music events, the stage architecture of his performance invites the audience into a world inspired not only by his most recent album Hugo, but also his formative lockdown experience of taking driving lessons with his father.

In playing an event as big as Reading, yes, there is the element of spectacle in the design; but complementary to this is a sincere showcase of a personal journey that offers a side of the artist we rarely get to see.

Loyle Carner at Reading Festival 2023: the stage design

Design studio The Unlimited Dreams Company (UDC) worked on the stage setting. Co-founder Harrison Smith says: 'The set was not really technically led', but more a process of becoming invested in telling a heartfelt story. He notes that very early on, it became obvious that ‘progression and evolution’ were the driving concepts for the design of this show.

Going beyond the usual representational props, the set uses real-life objects with visceral power as a part of its composition. At polar ends of the stage, a humble street light and the actual Volkswagen 93 Mark Two that Carner learned to drive in are the kingpins of the set. The approach was purposefully minimal, and collaborative. Harrison points out they followed Carner's culinary mantra: 'If it's not necessary, it's not on the plate.'

UDC co-founder George Thomson remarks: 'There’s something very special about the fact these two men were in a very confined metal box, where they had to talk together and work through their problems.' He continues: 'For a project that is rooted in storytelling, I feel we really had to have it as part of the set.'

The performance and stage set are curated to represent the span of a 12-hour day, using the cycle of the sun to narrate acts of self-inquisition. Taking cues from Hugo, the concept helps to narrate Carner’s lived experience of grappling with manhood, race and navigating emotional journeys with his father.

Despite the stripped-back nature of the set, designing and building it all was not without challenges. Thomson remembers, 'We had to modify and adapt and play with it. It's a practical constraint of fitting it in, but there's also an aesthetic aspect of making it look right. We really didn't want smaller venues to get a worse version of the show.' 

Wanting to create a communal experience, the usual rectangular use of floor space is done away with, instead cutting the corners to create a triangular layout for the physical platform – and therefore, a forced perspective. Thomson explains: 'The false perspective is actually carried on through light, so it also brings the audience into the set – [they are not just] looking into a window of a world.'

Alongside the performance itself, spatial elements encourage a state of empathy. In a time where we usually only see the shiny parts of people's lives, it’s refreshing to be let in on an experience that memorialises genuine moments of change, even the difficult parts. It's a spectacle that embraces authenticity, showing that all transformative moments are just as worthy to be hailed and celebrated.

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Londoners who cast their eyes across the Wapping skyline yesterday lunchtime, would have been struck by a transparent dome perched atop a ten-storey car park in Tobacco Dock; a bulbous cupola resembling a greenhouse or a biohazard bubble.

The structure was in fact the sky-high setting of the Alexander McQueen S/S 2022 show, a nature-celebrating creation designed by the brand's regular collaborator Smiljan Radic, the Chilean architect behind the organic forms of the label’s Old Bond Street London flagship, and whose shell-like 2014 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion was inspired by ancient Japanese temples and the concept of a fake ruin.

Alexander McQueen S/S 2022: step into Smiljan Radic’s sky-high show set

Radic’s bulging bubble, lined with concentric circles of chairs, reflected the influence that the London metropolis played in Burton's vision for the Alexander McQueen S/S 2022 collection. While the brand's S/S 2021 womenswear offering looked to mudlarking in the Thames, here Burton cast her eyes upwards to the sky of the brand's home city. ‘We moved from water... to the sky and the ever-changing, all-encompassing magnificence that represents,' she explained, referencing the magnificent views the rooftop of the label's studio offers, spanning from Saint Paul's Cathedral to the London Eye. This led Burton to consider the concept of storm chasing, as she watched the weather formations above the brand's headquarters, clusters of clouds accumulating, the changing of the skies from serene to sinister.

In the ethereal Alexander McQueen S/S 2022 offering, strapless dresses plumed like soft clouds around the body, abstract cloud prints swathed full skirts, fringed sequins cascaded like falling water, and shimmering crystal embellishments resembled light-illuminated rain.

Restriction and freedom, the city and the natural world, interior and exterior existence, antithetical elements amassed within Radic’s bubble-like show set, simultaneously shutting off and exposing its guests to the outside world, encouraging them to reach out and touch the crisp city skyline. ‘Storm chasing is not only about the beauty of the views but also a sense of mystery and excitement – about embracing the fact that we can’t ever be sure of what might happen next,' Burton explained. ‘To give up control and be directly in touch with the unpredictable is to be part of nature, to see and feel it at its most intense – to be at one with a world that is bigger and more powerful than we are.' 

INFORMATION

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Physical fashion shows were back with a bang across New York, London, Milan and Paris. Here, we present the best runway sets and venues that stole the show for S/S 2022, from Saint Laurent's womenswear spectacular under the sparkling lights of the Eiffel Tower, to Prada’s cross-continent and time-zone spanning set up. 

Best runway sets, S/S 2022 womenswear

Dior

Adding to the roster of female artists she collaborates with, womenswear artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri teamed up with octogenarian Italian artist Anna Paparatti on a board game-inspired show set. At the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, a runway was formed from a circle of colourful flooring panels set at various levels, and a backdrop boasted artworks resembling dartboards and roulette wheels, recalling Paparatti's 1960s artworks, which alluded to the absurdities of life.

Givenchy

For his first physical runway show for Givenchy, Matthew M Williams took guests to the Paris La Défense Arena, the largest indoor performance venue in Europe, on the outskirts of the French capital, with a stark, art gallery-inspired show set. Here, Williams bathed his guests in the glow of a cinematic sun, by suspending a monumental oculus from the ceiling of the vast space.

Valentino

Celebrating the café culture of Paris, so enjoyed by many guests for the first time in 18 months, Valentino installed rows of wicker dining seating at its Carreau du Temple venue, alongside a vibrant flower stall. The Roman house's show also spilled inclusively onto the streets outside the expansive indoor location, where models strutted and posed in front of diners and drinkers, seated at the city's inviting bistros.

Prada

Talk about a time zone-spanning, continent-crossing runway show. As guests in Milan installed themselves into Prada's regular Deposito venue at the Fondazione Prada, a location lined with geometric blocks of seating, so another audience was getting comfy at Shanghai’s Bund One. The two shows began simultaneously, and were live-streamed onto screens at both locations, with guests taking in models, in physical or digital form, sporting satin dresses and slouchy leather outerwear that riffed on notions of sexy. (Read more about OMA/AMO and Prada’s 25 years of show sets.)

Saint Laurent

After show films set on sprawling sand dunes and icy glaciers, Saint Laurent returned to its signature Trocadéro location in Paris, illuminated by the twinkling lights of the Eiffel Tower. Here, models walked across a vast runway in lean and seductive silhouettes inspired by Paloma Picasso, lit up by an industrial wall of spotlights. At the show's finale, a waterfall flooded the catwalk, a stunning feat of nature slap bang in the middle of the city.

Moncler MONDOGENIUS

The label staged its latest Moncler Genius collections as part of an immersive phygital live-streamed event spanning five cities: Milan, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul and New York. In Milan, guests watched from a film studio location, as host Alicia Keys appeared IRL, interacting with Shanghai host Victoria Song via a huge screen, and presenting 11 collection films, which were showcased one by one. 

Loewe

Stripping back Loewe’s new show space at Paris’ La Garde Républicaine of ‘bits and bobs’, creative director Jonathan Anderson wanted his S/S 2022 Loewe venue to resemble a ‘blank piece of paper’. This concept allowed the silhouettes in the collection to take centre stage. Here, they entered the stark, pine-swathed show venue from a trapdoor in the ground, a twist on how the viewer usually takes in forms from the feet up.

Hermès

No one cemented the sense of escape served up on the S/S 2022 catwalks more than Hermès, which had a private plane land on the tarmac of its Le Bourget airport show location, an hour from Paris. Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski also worked with French artist Flora Moscovici, who created a series of 6m-high abstract panoramas, drenched in sunset tones, which moved as models navigated a circular show space, sporting easy but infinitely luxurious summer silhouettes.

Rejina Pyo

The London-based designer made a medal-worthy splash for her S/S 2022 womenswear show, transporting guests to the Zaha Hadid-designed London Aquatics Centre in Stratford. Here, the audience lined the Olympic venue's swimming pool and at the show's social media-flooded finale, members of the Team GB divers made dramatic twists and turns into the water below.

Miu Miu

For guests keen to get back to the boardroom, Miu Miu served up an office-inspired show set where swiveling Eames office chairs lined a snaking runway at regular show location Palais d'Iéna in Paris. The catwalk was neighboured by oculus-shaped screens, which featured two comedic films by Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani that were also debuted as part of the brand's accompanying live stream on social media. 

Jil Sander

In Milan, Jil Sander bathed guests in a monochromatic lilac haze, in an all-purple show set swathing circular stools, the walls and ceiling. The set design offered a tranquil, almost sophorific setting, for creative director's Lucie and Luke Meier to present a womenswear offering reveling in tactile fabrications, architectural volumes and bold patterns, from tiger print coats to fluid deck chair stripe dresses, crochet polo shirts to androgynous tailoring. 

Coperni

Coperni founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant emphasized escapism for S/S 2022, which a collection that reveled in beach-ready silhouettes, suited for sun drenched shores in Ibiza or Greece. To amp up that out-of-office spirit, the brand swathed its runway with sand, lining the entrance to its catwalk space in Paris with 70,000 tall hemp trees, casting a heady scent around guests sat amongst the verdant shrubbery. 

‘Ay, caramba!' Last week Balenciaga showcased its own episode of The Simpsons, complete with a star-studded (Chief Wiggum, Smithers, Patty, Selma) catwalk show in Paris, as part of its innovative S/S 2022 presentation. In celebration of the screening, we look back to some of the most recent set design extravaganzas served up by the maison, taking its guests from graffiti-topped mountains to the auditorium of the European Parliament. If they don't stimulate your show-set senses, we'll eat our shorts.

Best Balenciaga fashion show sets: S/S 2022

Balenciaga literally rolled out the red carpet for S/S 2022 with a show-cum-film premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, which saw guests, from fashion journalists to A-listers, take a turn on the red carpet as they entered the venue. Taking their seats inside the ornate auditorium, they were treated to a special screening of The Simpsons, which saw its beloved characters travel to Paris and take part in a Balenciaga runway show. Cue Lisa and Maggie sporting pillar box-red peplum dresses, Marge wearing a voluminous gold gown complete with XL bow, and Homer rocking the brand's signature pufffer jacket as they strutted down the cartoon catwalk.

Balenciaga A/W 2020

Guests entered an apocalyptic, flooded landscape inside Luc Besson’s Cité du Cinema building in the suburbs of St Denis, Paris. Stadium seating was submerged in viscous water (unluckily for fashion editors, the first two rows were completely sunken). Models sloshed along the runway, while above them were projected huge images of global climate crisis – from raging flames to frantic birds in flight – and a techno soundtrack pounded. Backstage, creative director Demna Gvasalia offered a surprisingly positive take on his runway set-up, emphasising the power and beauty of fashion amidst a vision of the end of the world.

Balenciaga S/S 2020

In a show set inspired by Brussels, and the ongoing political tumult of Brexit, Gvasalia erected an in-the-round show set at Luc Besson’s Cité du Cinema building – which resembled the European Parliament. Guests sat in a spiral of office chairs in a huge curtain-lined assembly room that was swathed in bold blue, and on the ceiling, huge panels of strip lights illuminated the botched-cosmetic-surgery make-up looks sported by models on the carpeted runway.

Balenciaga S/S 2019

While, for A/W 2018, Gvasalia had taken guests to the peak of a graffiti-tagged mountain (below), for S/S 2019 he had a more immersive vision in mind. The designer created a catwalk-turned-video tunnel, lined with digital video installations devised by Canada-born video artist Jon Rafman. The psychedelic trip-like visuals surrounded guests as they watched the Paris-based show, projecting them into an uncanny alternative universe, as an eerie voice repeated ‘presence is key, now is the answer, ego is not who you are…’

Balenciaga A/W 2018

During his tenure at Balenciaga, Gvasalia has imagined show sets which evoke the everyday — like a roller blind-lined office or a tree-lined Paris park. There was a more intrepid air to the brand’s A/W 2018 show set, which featured a looming mountain within a Paris broadcasting studio. There was an urban edge to the landscape, which featured an all-white runway, evoking a snowy pathway or a blank canvas. The mountain at its centre was tagged with neon graffiti, boasting the Balenciaga brand name, celebratory slogans like ‘power of dreams’ and a smiley-faced emoji.

INFORMATION

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In the opening frames of the trailer for Netflix's Halston – the hotly-anticipated limited Ryan Murphy series released on 14 May 2021 – Ewan McGregor, in the role of titan American fashion designer Halston, stares in dark shadows from the 18 ft tall floor-to-ceiling windows of his majestic 21st floor office in Manhattan, and surveys the twinkling lights of the nighttime New York city skyline.

It's the late 1970s, and the Iowa-born designer has risen from the midwestern milliner who created Jacqueline Kennedy's 1961 presidential inauguration pill-box hat, to a decadent doyenne of the New York fashion scene, partying to excess with Andy Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent at Studio 54, and creating elegant elemental designs, like ‘Ultrasuede' shirtdresses and colourful kaftans, for his ‘Halstonettes', which included Bianca Jagger, Elsa Peretti and Liza Minnelli. He's also taken on a sprawling 12,000 sq ft office in the looming Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, where Halston Enterprises was based, an empire that formulated from 1973 when Halston sold his namesake to Norton Simon Inc, that included not only fashion, but fragrance, make-up and bedding.

Ultimately, Halston's expansion was his downfall. A 1983 licensing deal with affordable retailer JC Penny was a commercial and critical fail, and a year later, Halston was even banned from designing for his own company. ‘What more is there to build?' portentously asks Ed Austin, Halston's former boutique manager and lover, at the closure of Netflix's Halston trailer. 

As Netflix's Halston arrives on the small screen – its scenes swathed in sequins, shining with spotlights and sprinkled with cocaine – we take a closer look at the architectural locations that were symbolic of the designer's fame, fortune and much lamented downfall.

Netflix's Halston: mapping the limited series' standout locations

Palace of Versailles

In 1973, five American designers bought a sportswear-centric and ease-fulled attitude to the upper echelons of Parisian couture, when they they presented competing catwalk collections alongside five French behemoths: Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro and Marc Bohan. Halston was one of the five US designers who bought an A-list energy to proceedings, presenting alongside Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Anne Klein and Stephen Burrows. 

Halston’s catwalk segment? Think fluid sequin gowns that revealed shocking splices of skin as a spotlight illuminated models individually, plus a performance from Liza Minelli, who sang an adaptation of Bonjour, Paris sporting trousers and a polo neck. The event, or ‘Battle’ as it is fondly referred to today, was a major milestone in American culture with designers bringing a liberated and multicultural perspective to the perceived French fustiness of fashion.

Olympic Tower

Fifth Avenue’s glass-fronted 51-storey Olympic Tower was completed in 1976, and designed by Chicago-based Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architects behind some of the tallest buildings in the world, including Willis Tower (1973), One World Trade Centre (2014) and today, Burj Kahlifa. Halston Enterprises moved into the 21st floor of the building in 1978 after a nine month renovation, designed in collaboration with architects Gruzen & Partners, with the 12,000 sq ft space rumoured to only rival the size of Yves Saint Laurnet’s establishment. Its interior was swathed in cherry red paint and dizzying walls of mirror, and populated with Tiffany furnishings designed by Elsa Peretti. The enormous space featured alongside Halston’s office, a host of fitting and conference rooms, and was also frequently transformed into a catwalk for hot-ticket fashion shows.

Studio 54

An iconic venue that needs no introduction: the 1974-founded nightclub launched by Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, which lasted a mere three years, and was a bacchanal bolthole for Halston and his exuberant entourage. Cue Halston throwing Bianca Jagger a star-studded birthday party in 1977 (and that mythical story of her entering the club on a white horse), or partying with Liza Minnelli and Andy Warhol the same year, as the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve and 4000 kg of glitter was released onto revellers on the dance floor. Few people ever made it through the mythical walls of Studio 54, with its bouncers operating a notoriously inpenetrable door policy, as partyers pushed against its velvet ropes on West 54th Street. Warhol wrote in his 1979 book, Andy Warhol’s Exposures: ‘Studio 54 is a dictatorship at the door, but a democracy on the dance floor.’ 

INFORMATION

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American architect and designer David Rockwell designed the set for the 2021 Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles.

The awards took place at LA’s Art Deco Union Station, an iconic hollywood venue that has been used as the backdrop for movies such as Blade Runner, The Dark Knight Rises and Pearl Harbor. Rockwell’s design for Steven Soderbergh’s intimate Academy Awards ceremony transformed the venue into ‘an indoor/outdoor supper club’ for nominees and their guests, a design referencing ‘the intimacy and understated elegance of the Academy’s very first ceremonies.’

Oscars 2021: discover the David Rockwell-designed set

The Oscars set design featured four separate spaces taking over the station’s Ticket Concourse, Waiting Room, as well is its North and South Patios. The design concept for the Oscars set offered a nod to the early awards ceremonies, which were often staged as seated dinners inside some of LA’s most iconic ballrooms.

This was Rockwell’s third Oscar set design, following his collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the 81st and 82nd Oscars at the Rockwell Group-designed Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

The eclectic set design was defined by a rich material palette featuring wood, metallic touches, saturated colours and textures, which came together to celebrate the building’s Art Nouveau architecture. Integrated technology throughout the space brought the old school Hollywood set into modern times and gave it added flexibility.

Throughout the set, Rockwell created a series of custom-designed café tables and chairs placed on the multi-tiered seating balconies, with custom-built wooden banquettes in blue velvet for the lower, stage-facing seats. Oscar-inspired lamps offered illumination throughout the set and functioned as centrepieces for the bistro-style tables. 

The room was framed with a series of art-deco inspired screens, installed along a raised promenade and equipped with a series of live picture frames exhibiting historical photographs from past Oscar ceremonies (during the ceremony, these screens also delivered live content that mirrored what appeared on the main screens onstage to give an immersive experience).

The Oscars stage this year featured a circular podium in rich, inlaid wood with an asymmetric tiered design for accessibility. Two screens flanking the stage featured the same art deco motif found at the back. Completing and anchoring the stage was a blue velvet drape with oversized matching tassels.

INFORMATION

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The pandemic may have put paid to physical fashion shows, but July saw an outpouring of creativity and ingenuity as designers and brands turned to other channels to present their S/S21 menswear and haute couture collections. The challenge to create designs and gure out new methods of showcasing them also occurred during lockdown, with teams collaborating remotely via Zoom and on socially distanced shoots. The big democratising upside of digital fashion weeks that started with Shanghai in March is that everyone worldwide has a front-row view. This week also sees the launch of RUNWAY360, a new digital platform launched by the CFDA to showcase New York Fashion Week S/S 2021 which will debut collections using a host of different formats, beginning with Jason Wu and concluding with Tom Ford.

Out of this year's chaos and seemingly impossible circumstances, fashion has been shot into digital space and it is proving a fascinating journey. The shows did go on, with designs featured on avatars (Ralph
& Russo, August Getty Atelier), in 3D animations (Botter, Louis Vuitton) and in delightful mini films that blend real and fantasy worlds. Iris van Herpen cast Game
of Thrones’ Carice van Houten in her Escher- in infuenced multifaceted film, with hyper-real close-ups of fabric and embellishments.
At Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri enlisted film director Matteo Garrone (Dogman, Pinocchio) who created a schmaltzy fairytale short,
 Le Mythe, that saw nymphs frolic in CGI bucolic landscapes and encounter the collection in the form of miniature gowns that arrived in a portable ‘maison’ carried by bellboys. The piece was bookended with real footage from the couture atelier, featuring the petites mains making couture gowns
at 40 per cent scale, echoing the miniature mannequins that Christian Dior created to promote collections in 1944.

Meanwhile at Maison Margiela, John Galliano and Nick Knight collaborated on
 a thrilling film spun out through teaser
clips on Instagram to promote the Artisanal collection. It features models swaggering and posing in painterly chromatic compositions, like otherworldly spectres in dramatic silhouettes. You could call it hallucinogenic haute couture. Knight also worked on a film to accompany Valentino’s collection, debuted at a live show at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. 

Some presentations were punkish and DIY – Boramy Viguier’s spinning lookbook images overlaid on a Dadaist collage background – and others, airy and lyrical. Issey Miyake’s choreographed ‘show’, entitled Meet Your New Self, blended free-form dance sequences with fantasy ights across cityscapes and animations of blooming fabric houseplants made of the brand’s signature Pleats fabric. The lm was directed by Yusuke Kobayashi, with digital e ects by Whiteboard Ltd. 

While fashion creatives are acutely aware of what they are missing – the emotional and storytelling impact of IRL fashion shows – and editors and buyers yearn for the group experience and the tactile examination of collections, eyes have had to be opened to new alternatives. Just as football teams adjust to the reality of empty stadiums, fashion is adjusting to displaced realities. 

‘The pandemic in all its awfulness has allowed people to step off the treadmill and address how they want to express themselves creatively. The question of showing a collection through any means except for
a catwalk has stimulated invention,’ says Knight, who set up Showstudio as a hub for fashion filmmaking some 20 years ago. ‘The medium of the catwalk show really came into being in the 1940s. The fashion business is
 a different beast today, yet the show system has not changed and there’s a big disconnect. ‘I have been working with models on Zoom shoots,’ he says. ‘The make-up artist might be in LA, the stylist in Jamaica and I “direct” the web camera, working with the available light in the room. It’s thrilling and just as creatively demanding as working on set. I am a rm believer in using everything that comes to hand, whether that’s an iPhone or a thermal camera or a security camera or a 3D scan, or an X-ray – these are all tools like charcoal or oil or a pencil. Art has come out of the gallery and lm out of the physical “set”.’ It is strange, he adds that while fashion is a cutting-edge art form, the show system ‘has been so wedded to the past’.

During lockdown, Knight masterminded a CGI avatar of Kendall Jenner for Riccardo Tisci at Burberry. It started with Jenner photographing herself at home, with Knight creating a digital Jenner body using a model in a motion-capture suit, and was set against a minimalist architectural background in CGI resembling an empty pool. Burberry will be staging a live show in September outdoors but with no spectators. 

As brands turn to animation, CGI and VFX, there are learning curves on both sides. Creative digital studios might be whizzes at building immersive AR worlds for gaming, but rendering the lustre, embroidery, and detail of an £80,000 haute couture gown, and translating the ‘dream’ of fashion into movement and setting demands new skill sets, processes, deep pockets and patience. ‘There are a lot of similarities between a digital atelier and a couture one. We replicate seams and cuts so the clothes move in tune with the body, as the materials would IRL,’ says Leanne Elliott Young, co-founder of the London-based agency, Institute of Digital Fashion. ‘Yet brands often have no idea of the application involved, the timelines or the processes. The current crisis has acted as an accelerator.

Tuning into a digital experience would have been a massive ask for consumers, buyers and press; now we have found our audience much more open,’ says Young, who with co-founder and digital artist Cattytay is working on a series called Tinnitus for LA- based August Getty. The designer, an activist within the LGBTQ community, describes it as ‘a modern biopic, a bold alternative to the tired narratives of couture, a series not a show, a new world not our old one.’ The project will be introduced through social media, web and press as a series over six months. Says Young, ‘Strategically we built in a level of intrigue and a narrative with crescendos and characters. The characters and landscapes are beyond our realities, very fitting for a brand that is thinking beyond seasons. The viewing is no longer con ned to old hierarchies of front row or backstage, or the limitations of live streaming. This is a democratised viewing portal.’

Digital showcases can also be nostalgic. Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter, co-founders of the Botter menswear label, commissioned animation studio Trappist Monk to create a game featuring their character, Aqua Novio. ‘My first experience of virtual worlds was through Nintendo. We wanted to recapture some of the excitement of choosing your player and the outfit,’ says Botter of their amicable cartoon figure, who tries on out oufits with the click of a cursor. ‘The most important thing about fashion is to express emotions and put out something new, but you can’t compare these digital pieces to a catwalk show, which is when you invite people into your world with music and real emotions. It is a complement,’ says Herrebrugh, who also presented a short  lm shot in the atelier with two models.

At Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh likewise embraced a sense of playfulness. His cartoon The Adventures of Zoooom with Friends saw stowaway characters bursting out of shipping containers and gamboling through the sites of Paris in Abloh’s sunny clothes. The ten- minute work married FX animation by Re ieknow, of Fashion Figure Inc, with 3D modelling, texturing and scenic visuals. To note: the credit list, spanning studios, styling, casting and visual effects, was longer than the IRL fashion show equivalent. Such animations are not a budget option. It takes two days just to render a couture look on an avatar, and a suite of software tools. ‘We analyse the fabric weight and drape against the  esh and calculate this exact detailing when simulating the collision between garment and digital human,’ says Cattytay of digitisation’s painstaking process.

For its avatar-driven couture presentation, Ralph & Russo worked with Seoul-based digital design studio VSLB. Tamara Ralph’s idea was for a cyber model called Hauli (meaning strength and power in Swahili) to pose in front of the Seven Wonders of the World. Says Sarah Schmidt, VSLB’s CEO and founder, ‘First, we built the avatar body with the precise body type for haute couture and set the poses and created the textures for the skin, eyes and hair. Next, we modelled the base shape of the garments to the avatar in a T pose. From the T pose, the avatar was animated to the final pose to simulate the look. Fabric textures followed, while jewellery and accessories were created in dierent software. Each piece was brought as a raw file into the final rendering software, where we textured the look. Each back plate received special lighting settings to enhance colours.

The digital reinvention of the show might have been considered ‘counter-cultural’ ve years ago. Now, the medium appears a viable alternative. It’s also friendlier to the planet than physical shows and shoots, with their elaborate sets and vast teams that, along with the audience, y into fashion capitals from all over the world. The Fashion Innovation Agency at the London College of Fashion is working on a project with experience creation studio Helo, AR pioneers Rewind, and design agency Twin Studio. ‘The shift is being brought about by necessity, but the benefits will far outweigh the criticism in the long term. Covid-19 has accelerated the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution in many industries, including fashion. Digitisation is less wasteful and more inclusive,’ says Phoebe Smith, managing director of Helo, which has bases in London, New York and LA.

There is a cluster of brands and designers who are also choosing to show off-grid or in hybrid ‘phy-gital’ shows. Saint Laurent and Gucci will not be taking part in forthcoming September fashion weeks. Meanwhile, show design and production agency Bureau de Betak set up a division, Bureau Future, two years ago, specialising in digital strategy and technology that amplies the live event online. Says founder Alex de Betak, ‘One of the tools that will help fashion become more eco-responsible is digital broadcasting. Covid-19 has accelerated that need, as will the recession. Nothing can replace the live events and physical encounters, but the parameters of the show need to be updated with a reduction in the size of the audience.

Without the constraints that come with a huge audience, designers are freed up creatively.’ De Betak produced a Jacquemus show off-schedule in a Paris suburb in July for a restricted audience, and a Dior cruise presentation in Puglia, Italy. ‘We are looking at how to amplify the experience online with interactive features and AR. With that shift brands can attract fresh eyes and audiences.’ What the new era of showmanship is giving fashion enthusiasts as well as industry professionals is an unprecedented insight into the ateliers, the processes and the inspirations behind the collections. It is pushing the parameters and expanding the ideals and aspirations that fashion embodies.

This article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Wallpaper* (W*257) – on newsstands now and available for free download here

‘There are lots of flowers I’ve never seen in Tokyo, like anemones, mimosas and others whose names I don’t know. When I walk past a flower shop I feel very cheerful,’ Japanese designer Kenzo Takada wrote in a letter to his mother in 1965, a year after arriving in Paris via a month-long ocean voyage. The natural world has long been a motif of the house. When Takada opened his revolutionary boutique Jungle Jap in 1970, its walls were emblazoned with tropical murals inspired by Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910), and from its outset, the brand’s clothing has been festooned with floral forms. 

For his debut A/W 2020 show as creative director of Kenzo, Felipe Oliveira Baptista (who served as creative director of Lacoste from 2010-2018), drew on Kenzo’s naturalistic heritage. On the grassy lawns that line the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds in Paris, Baptista erected a transparent tubular structure, formed from bisecting paths, lined with benches. ‘It was designed as a modular nomadic object,’ says the Azores-born Baptista.

Baptista was inspired by the cross-cultural heritage of the brand, which combined Japanese silhouettes like flat kimono shapes and bold hues with Parisian cuts, and his own border-spanning sartorial DNA. Just as Takada took emotive inspiration from South-East Asia, India, West Africa and Europe (areas he passed through on his journey to Paris), Baptista also looked to his own personal narratives, taking inspiration from summers spent as a child in the Azores and an image of his newlywed parents in Mozambique about to embark on a skydive.

For Baptista’s fellow nomads, the designer proposed an elegant yet utterly practical wardrobe: down jackets that transform into sleeping bags, dresses in cocooning shapes, utility belts, protective headgear and parkas that expand like wings. Naturalistic tones and patterns included a camouflage print, in fact formed from a Trompe-l'œil of roses and a series of painting dresses were emblazoned with expressionist tiger heads, taken from works by Portuguese artist Julio Pomar. These animalistic artworks wouldn't have looked out of place on the walls of the original Jungle Jap boutique in Galerie Vivienne.

Sustainable show set design has been an emphatic element of the A/W 2020 shows. In Milan, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele forgoed a physical invitation for a personal Whatsapp voice memo sent to each guest, while at Bottega Veneta, Daniel Lee swapped a hard copy invitation for an email animation. Additionally, instead of building an excessive show set, Lee simply projected scenes of a Palladium villa onto reusable fabric screens.

‘The set will be re-used in other forms at events in the coming seasons, such as pop-up stores or presentations,’ Baptista says of Kenzo's tubular show set. Produced in collaboration with Bureau Betak, the events agency announced yesterday its shift into eco-conscious production. It is the first significant company worldwide to receive ISO 20121 certification for sustainable event management. After all, Kenzo's future nomads need a natural world to wander through.

INFORMATION

www.kenzo.com

Architecturally-minded Lucie and Luke Meier have an affinity for extravagantly sized spaces. For the duo’s debut S/S 2018 show as creative directors of Jil Sander, they showcased their summer vision outdoors in a yet-to-open shopping centre in a Zaha Hadid-designed residential tower. Last season, their atmospheric S/S 2020 offering was shown inside an open-air courtyard at Pinacoteca di Brera, a baroque arch-lined art gallery and cultural institution in Milan, against a ten tonne installation of gravel, formed from mounds of stone.

Industrially inclined for autumn, the Meiers chose a recently refurbished former thermo-electric station on Via Bramante in Milan for their A/W 2020 show location. It once belonged to the State Electricity Company, and Sander is the first brand to hold a fashion show there. ‘We love the space because it’s a work in progress,’ they explain. ‘We’re here for a fleeting moment and we like the temporary essence.’ The concrete and steel-clad space will soon become the exhibition site of ADI, the Associazione per il Design Industriale.

The duo were also attracted to the venue for its expanse. ‘The volume of the space is the most important connection as we are able to accentuate the movement of the clothes,’ they say of the serendipity between venue and collection, which featured A-shaped coats, dresses in floating silk jacquard and taffeta with voluminous pleated sleeves and a handmade cape made of gauzy silk and viscose fringes.

In a final theatrical flourish, the space was populated with mismatched vintage chairs sourced in France and Italy. As each of the models strode down the catwalk they settled on one of the wooden seating options which lined the centre of the runway. The show may have been a transient moment and it’s venue in a state of flux, but the clothes that featured on the catwalk will last a lifetime.

INFORMATION

jilsander.com

As editors zipped from fashion show to show in London on Sunday, their phones vibrating with street style images and catwalk shots on Instagram, and updates about the gales of Storm Dennis, a Whatsapp message from Alessandro Michele popped up on their phones. Inside, a voice note from Gucci’s creative director offered a welcoming Invitation, ‘Ciao, how are you? I was thinking if you’re not too busy, you could come to my show next Wednesday at the Gucci Hub in Milano?’ He even signed off the audio message with a kiss.

Michele is a master of anticipation — his elusive brand invitations have included a mask of a classical bust housed inside a huge wooden box, a creamy green tin packed with unusual ephemera and a orange box resembling a ticking explosive device. But for A/W 2020 his invite approach was more intimate, sustainable and conversational — we even contemplated accepting the invitation with our own voice note. In the run up to the show, Michele also messaged guests their seating allocations and even sent a close up image of himself travelling by car to the show space, sporting mismatched pastel toned nail varnish, eyeball motif rings, a checked coat and floral trainers.

For A/W 2020 Michele divulged his fascination with the ritualistic nature of the runway show — the weeks of organising that goes on behind closed doors, the backstage hair and make up, the soundchecks, cumulating in an audience finally being seated, and the runway lights cinematically illuminating a reveal. ‘In a celebration that feeds off expectations, my thought takes its shape and goes public,’ he said in Gucci’s show notes. This meant that just as guests saw behind the scenes into Michele travelling to the Gucci Hub venue — they entered not through its Piuarch-designed front entrance, but through a backstage door, with models sporting rhinestone headpieces, and streaking mascara still in hair and make up. Assistants were on hand to apply hair extensions and face serums, as they lounged in flannel dressing gowns. 'I offer my poetics to this tribe of emancipated spectators,’ Michele added of opening up the underbelly of his runway show. ‘May they use it to wonder. May they help me to understand it.’

As guests made their way through backstage, through a black curtain they found themselves in a dark carpet-lined octagonal room, bathed in soft light, with a gauzy pink circular curtain at its centre. The beginning of the show was signalled with a Federico Fellini voiceover describing in Italian the ritualistic nature of cinema — punctuated by queuing, ticket purchasing and being seated in an auditorium. When the show began the curtain dropped to reveal another backstage set up, with assistants in dark grey uniforms dressing models in seventies suiting, priests outfits and victoriana ruffled dresses. A symbol of the sacred minutes that mark a runway show, the grandstand design of the set up surrounded a neon lit metronome at the runway’s centre. It provided a serendipitous comparison with the status of show production: ‘Then the lights dim, the cinema screen turns on and the revelation brings,’ Michele added. In today’s content hungry world — where brands reveal pieces that will be on the runway days before the show, or dress guests in looks yet to even make the catwalk — the more brand devotees see behind the scenes into the brand, the more power a label will harness. Michele, a thoroughly modern mind, is always one step ahead in this awareness. ‘May that wild and crazy hive that I made my home have a throne’ he concluded of throwing the inner confines of the Gucci world into the open. It’s the jewel in the catwalk crown.

INFORMATION

gucci.com

‘I love collaborating with and creating partnerships with other women,’ says Roksanda Ilinčić of the female-focused celebratory space she creates within her eponymous brand. Ilinčić first nodded to the bold spatial creations of Rana Begum in her pre-fall 2019 collection, after discovering the artist's sculptural pieces at Frieze London. Colour and light are fundamental to both of the women’s practises – prismatic aesthetics stemming from childhoods in Serbia and Bangladesh respectively. For A/W 2020, this resulted in a collaborative London Fashion Week runway installation inside the majestic courtyard of the Durbar Court of The Foreign & Commonwealth Office.  

Floating above the catwalk like a modernist cloud, Begum’s spray-painted netting installation was inspired by fishermen on flooded rice fields in Bangladesh. The lightweight material – chosen by Begum because it can be ‘pulled to create tension and force’ – was sourced in Morocco during the artist's residency last year at Istanbul Modern. The installation – painted in block neon colours – results in tones bleeding into each other as light radiates through the netting in a haze of diffracted colours. It captured the essence of Ilinčić’s A/W 2020 offering, which featured fluid caped dresses, slouchy leather sportswear and chunky cable jumpers in a rainbow of lime, aubergine, magenta and caramel . ‘This collection is really about creating lightness and movement, told with different mediums,’ she explains.

There’s always a strong sense of narrative between Ilinčić’s runway and ready-to-wear design. Last season, she enlisted the London-based art collective Troika to create an abstract runway installation featuring six rainbow projections, inspired by its 2019 Barbican artwork ‘Borrowed Light’. Like the light shining through Begum’s installation, her A/W 2020 collaboration also illuminates female creativity. ‘Art and architecture is the starting point of all of my collections and it's such an honour to have all those wonderful people around me who I've been collaborating with to help me to tell my story.’

INFORMATION

ranabegum.com
roksanda.com

Benji B is all about connecting the dots. Fashion, music, design – for the London-based DJ and producer the art forms are all on the same plane, tapping into the same frequencies. ‘I don’t see a distinction. All of these practices are about turning ideas into form,’ he says.  

It’s a philosophy that has shaped his career for over 20 years – first at the helm of his BBC Radio 1 show and his seminal club night, Deviation, and more recently through his work in fashion as the go-to curator of sound and music for the likes of Louis Vuitton, Cerruti 1881 Paris , Celine, Bethany Williams and Gieves and Hawkes.

Crafting some of the most memorable fashion week soundtracks, Benji collaborated closely with Phoebe Philo during her time at Celine, experimenting with everything from time-delayed speakers to famously recording the ambient street sounds of Paris.

‘That particular collection was inspired by a French film that had extremely crude sounds. I recorded drilling on the street – and it was amazing to watch the audience response. Some of the most famous fashion critics feeling uncomfortable, and then watching that discomfort turn to surrender. It was fascinating!’

When long-term friend and collaborator Virgil Abloh took the helm of Louis Vuitton as artistic director for menswear in 2018, Benji was the natural choice as music selector. ‘Putting together the show in the Palais Royal, it was just a moment,’ he says of their debut S/S 2019 collaboration – where Canadian group BadBadNotGood brought to life the rainbow hued collection, changing keys with each colour shift. ‘It’s such a privilege to use music to add another dimension to how people engage with fashion.’

It’s not just the clothing but also the set design that shapes the sound. ‘When I do music for fashion shows, it’s about the space and responding to it. The music can be a complement to the set or a juxtaposition to it’ he says. Seeing the collection at an early stage, he thinks about the whole experience, how it will sound, look and feel. ‘The music I do is not in the background, it’s part of the experience. It’s part of the clothes, it’s part of the art.’

Like Abloh and Kanye West – who he also regularly collaborates with, Benji is compelled by the more democratic direction of fashion in the social media era. ‘Instagram has blown apart the idea of gatekeepers. The idea that you have to get to a certain stage before you are able to engage with nice things, whether its expensive watches or fashion, no longer applies. The true definition of luxury is not a power yacht in Monaco, it’s something that’s hand made – whether that’s from an established brand or a new designer who has taken the time to craft a piece. It’s really about authenticity.’ 

What’s meaningful to people in their everyday lives is what drives him. ‘The reason I love design so much is that people are able to turn ideas into something that has a use. This is true of furniture and music, but also great clothing. When you cut through the circus of the fashion world, when you work with the true creatives – Virgil Abloh, Bethany Williams, Kim Jones – without exception these people are amazing artists. They are at the level of Frank Gehry or Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring – that’s why they are where they are. Sometimes with the noise of fashion you can overlook how authentic and gifted these people truly are.’

How does he see the fashion show evolving in the future? ‘Well, it’s mind blowing to me that we can stream shows on Instagram Live. That wasn’t possible just a few years ago. But when you think about it, McQueen did AI twenty years ago – so who knows where it can go next? In a sense London deserves so much credit for bringing theatre to fashion shows over the years.’

INFORMATION

mixcloud.com/benjib

A monastic all-white show set, housed inside a sleek monochromatic box like a Brutalist place of worship. Church-like arches lined with grinding electrical shutters, revealing models moving through a metal chair-lined space on four aqua-toned airport travelators, like an oddly animated stairway to heaven, or a purgatorial departure lounge.

Compared to the reflective mirror-swathed disco ball A/W 2019 show set last season, Gucci’s S/S 2020 show set at its Piuarch-designed hub had a pared-back, ecclesiastical air. Part all white place of worship, part an eerie hospital or sterile spaceship you’d imagine when waking up after a general anaesthetic.

Last season, a 100m long mirrored runway was almost blindingly floodlit with 120,000 flashing and reflected LED lights, concealing clothing details from view. Conversely for spring a clinical sky tessellated with star-shaped lights, first projecting an urgent red hue then turning white, bought Gucci’s S/S 2020 clothing into focus. Added emphasis came in glowing rows of strip lighting that lined the Perspex walls of travelators and the ceiling space directly above them.

‘Focus’ is an apt way to describe the company’s recent structural efforts, where, of late, every item in its supply chain, has been closely examined. Bringing an X-Ray lens to its manufacturing processes, Gucci announced earlier this month that it is now entirely carbon neutral, offsetting all green house emissions annually from its entire operations and supply chains.

If Alessandro Michele has been ironically pigeonholed by his encyclopaedic references, and post modern mash up of genres, shapes and symbolism, S/S 2020 pushed a new perspective. The show began with the crunching sound of metal as the shutters on its arches were lifted. Through them appeared Michele’s first batch of models, moving zombie-like down the travelator runways, in eerily simplistic all white looks resembling straight jackets with thick buckles and grubby mental asylum pyjamas. Mid way through the show the red light flickered before plunging the audience into darkness amidst the buzzing sounds of lightbulbs blowing. Then, the electronic voice of Crash Land (Bijoux Remix), ‘This is the way to do it’ ushered in a new uplifting mood. Models took to the catwalk in a simplified – yet still ostentatious – take on Michele’s mindset, clad in flared 1970s suiting, lace negligees and chainmail gowns, carrying fetishistic riding crops and horsebit detail handbags.

The set, which was a sublime blend of the interstellar and the ecclesiastical was a striking symbol of future hope. Not simply a motif for a heavenly world, it was organised according to the ISO 20121, an international standard that defines the sustainability of an event taking into consideration its environmental, social and economic aspects. Seventy per cent of the set’s materials were recycled or reused, lighting was LED, show invitations were produced using FSC paper, single use plastic was eliminated.

Ostentatious and overblown catwalk design, and the incredible waste and energy it can create, has been a prescient environmental topic in recent seasons. It’s something that Milan’s catwalks are confronting head on. On Friday, Marni created a jungle-inspired installation on its catwalk, created by Berlin artist Judith Hopf. Palm tree fronds were made from ucycled plastic bottles from the brand’s S/S 2020 men’s show in June.

Like the models moving along Gucci’s travelator runways, clad in colourful dresses, retro shapes and smatterings of costume jewellery, the show venue design was a symbol of a brand moving animatedly into the future under a star-lined sky.

INFORMATION

gucci.com

Merce Cunningham shifted modern dance on its axis. Now, ten years after his death, and 100 years since his birth, London’s Barbican has celebrated the choreographers legacy with a fittingly groundbreaking performance: Night of 100 Solos. The challenging work played for just one night in April, and saw sister performances in New York and LA. A total of 100 solos graced stages, many in unison, with 25 performers per location.

The Barbican event showcased important dancers on the London circuit. Siobhan Davies continues her relationship with the institution, after her fascinating installation with Glithero at Barbican in 2017, alongside standout performances from Billy Trevitt and Michael Nunn (of BalletBoyz fame) and Beatriz Stix-Brunell. In Cunningham’s distinct style, dancers became insectile and angular, while possessing a kind of intangible grace. ‘If you're not trained in Merce Cunningham it just feels completely awkward, and you feel completely ugly for the first couple of rehearsals,’ says Nunn in an accompanying film promoting the performance. ‘And then it all slowly starts to make sense. I think that’s the beauty of it.’

The Marcel Duchamp-inspired was as intriguing as the dancers. Swathing projections by late artist Richard Hamilton backlit the stage. They’re taken from Shadows Cast by Readymades – a black-and-white video collage that Hamilton made for a Cunningham performance at the Barbican in 2005, directly drawing on the works of Duchamp. Hamilton’s set design for the original performance (which took place on 14 June 2005) comprised a projected collage of film and photographs that reflected on Duchamp’s readymades; mixing images with text from his publication the Green Box. The projects reflect Duchamp’s interest in movement and gravity – an apposite theme to connect with Cunningham's performance.

An upturned watering can rotates obliquely, spilling nothing, as two dancers in pivot in uncoordinated isolation. A dancer clad in lurid pink lycra performs a simple routine of Battement frappé, under the shadow of an enormous black umbrella. All the while a corkscew descends ominously on the screen behind.

A star-cast production continues with the score, performed in part by artist and former Wallpaper* Guest Editor Christian Marclay, alongside Mira Benjamin, John Lely, and Anton Lukoszevieze, coordinated by Christian Wolff. John Cage-esque, filled with metallic riffs, tinny sequences, and the odd scream, one imagines its not the easiest score to dance to. Indeed, the performers are said to have heard it for the first when the curtain rose. Instead, they dance around the music – another Cunningham technique that’s been honoured, in order to spark a sense of organic connection between dancer, musician and audience.

INFORMATION

Merce Cunningham: Night of 100 solos was performed on 16 April 2019. For more information, visit the Barbican website

ADDRESS

Barbican
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS

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Watch as one of David Korins’ concepts for the Oscars stage, Proscenium, comes to life

David Korins knows how to make a scene. The veteran production designer, and one of the Wallpaper 2019 Design Award judges, has created backdrops for everything from Broadway wunderkind Hamilton to megawatt musicians like Lady Gaga. But for the 91st annual Academy Awards, he flips the script and puts his designs at the forefront.

‘[Awards shows] have no linear, written narrative,’ Korins explains. ‘It’s not like we have to find ourselves in Washington’s tent. Creating the environment for the show is a huge deal because I get to decide what the narrative will be.’

For Hollywood’s biggest night, it’s all about inclusivity. ‘There are too many hard lines being drawn, and people are not experiencing these large, cultural events as a community,’ he says. ‘I have the responsibility to try my best to open up the dialogue.’

An asymmetrical proscenium made with 115 foam blocks breaks the fourth wall, stretching out into the audience and engulfing some of the box seats. Onstage, the set rotates through 15 concepts, varying from ribbons made of roses (over 40,000 real roses were used throughout the night) and a golden gate, which he likens to a beautiful piece of jewellery.

Korins also partnered with Swarovski to integrate over 41,000 crystals into four designs. Highlights include the Crystal Cloud, an interpretation of atmosphere clouds made with over 1,250 crystal strands, and the Crystal Swag, which looks like a waterfall flowing upwards.

Whether you’re in the audience or streaming the show at home, Korins hoped all viewers felt the warm and welcoming atmosphere.

‘There is a movie for every kind of person,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t matter your age, race, creed, nationality, anything – there’s a movie for you. [The set] is a celebration of that and storytelling.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the David Korins website