Ermenegildo Zegna Couture: artistic director Alessandro Sartori worked with the Swiss artist Thomas Flechtner on a snow-sprinkled show set in Milan’s Bocconi University. Sartori was inspired by Flechtner’s 2002 series SNOW – a powdery patch of artificial snow formed the floor of the catwalk, which was lined with graphic ice blocks.
Marni: creative director Francesco Risso created a scrapyard-like show set for his A/W 2018 menswear offering. Guests entered a run-down industrial space on Viale Umbria in Milan, to be greeted with a space laid with crunchy, grey gravel and festooned with objects including a disused dodgem car, jerry can, giant giraffe cuddly toy, bags of flour and worn out leather suitcases. These unusual objects formed the seating for the show, and had editors whispering as to whether the flour of choice was gluten-free.
Thom Browne: the brand staged a wintry scene at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, with a set populated with fake powdery snow and leafless birch trees. The centre of the space was lined with sleeping bag-topped ski loungers in the label’s signature red white and blue, appearing like resting stations for explorers at the base of a snowy Thom Browne mountain. At the show’s climax, models in grey all-in-ones, unzipped each sleeping bag and snuggled inside.
Prada: the Milanese brand came equipped with storage solutions for A/W 2018, working with regular collaborators AMO (the research arm of Rem Koolhaas’ OMA studio) on crate stacked show space in a new venue on Viale Ortles. The ‘Prada Warehouse’ came complete with boxes stamped with imaginary Prada logos and visual motifs of the brand, from a banana stamp, stegosaurus and UFO, to the name of the label spelt backwards. Corrugated metal formed the base of the catwalk, while wood-chipped OSB benches and plastic wrapped boxes acted as seating.
Lanvin: artistic director Lucas Ossendrijver created not one but four runways for his A/W 2018 menswear show, held in the Grande Verrière of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. These lengths were lined with foldable wooden seats and populated with long vertical stands holding rows of spotlights, which illuminated the catwalk.
Dirk Bikkembergs: inspired by the many facets of the art world, designer Lee Wood lined his show space with storage crates and featured dilapidated benches and flooring, which evoked the rough and splintered back of a canvas. Distorting mirrored columns brought a sense of depth to the space on Via Compagnoni in Milan, and soft spotlights nodded to those found in museum exhibition halls.
