CMU School of Drama


Friday, March 15, 2024

12 extraordinary runway sets from the A/W 2024 shows

Wallpaper: A charred desert of Murano-glass cacti, a damask-curtained boudoir, a simulacrum of an art gallery – this season’s runway sets were an exercise in the theatre of fashion. Here, we select 12 of the very best runway sets and show spaces of A/W 2024 fashion month, which concluded in Paris last week.

4 comments:

Julia Adilman said...

These were quite exciting to look at and explore. I would love to be able to combine my knowledge of theatrical design and fashion together one day and create runway sets like these. It seems like this year there was a great theatrical sense in all of these sets. I have not seen this many runway sets that are this theatrical before and it makes me quite excited for the fashion scene. It seems like other-worldly and dreamlike sets were the theme of the year, and I am here for it. They all seem quite geometrical and modern as well, which makes a lot of them look quite a lot like the set for Passage. It might just be because I’m on crew for it right now, but especially Saint Laurent’s and Louis Vuitton’s runways remind me of Passage. I think the green tones in Saint Laurent’s are quite stunning and I love the texture they were able to create with the beautiful curtains and shiny floor interacting with each other.

Carolyn Burback said...

It was really fun looking at the different compositions of the runways displayed in the article because I think it’s a sector of the work we can move into as theatre-makers that is not mentioned that often outside of perhaps the costume department. I found this article title intriguing because I designed and built the runway display for Räyya’s Playground fashion show and am signed up to do it again next year so I think it’s neat to expand my knowledge of what can be done besides just a straight line. I was really interested in the Fendi image for the soft goods hanging seemed like a neat but also unique way of creating a tunnel for the models to walk through. Hermès seemed intense with the rain coming down from the ceiling as that must’ve been a more involved technical aspect to their show as well as in collaboration with the designers for how to work with live water.

Luna said...

I have always been very interested in fashion. When I was younger, i never let my mother dress me, I always had to pick out what I wanted to wear and express my personality through it. One thing that we did together for years was watching shows like Project RUnway together weekly. When they began, it would mostly just consist of a white runway with a back surrounding. I guess this allowed the audience’s main focus to be the clothing that the designers constructed. I saw that as seasons went along though, that runway design was more apparent. I especially saw this in the newer shows like Next in Fashion. Personally, I think that designing the runway for the shows is really cool and creates a more immersive experience. It is interesting how similar a fashion show can be to a theater performance because it uses a lot of the same elements like lighting, set, sound, clothing and video media design.

Ana Schroeder said...

I guess I have never really considered designing sets for other performance art, specifically for runway and high fashion. It seems like it would be a combination of architecture and set design. I think the intersectionality of installation art is hard for me to wrap my head around since there are so many conventional and unconventional spaces being used. For example, the Louis Vuitton runway, which is located in a very well-known and highly historical place such as the Louvre, is very different from the Prada runway, where it looks like the space was a blank concrete box to begin with. I hope one day I will be able to attend or work in the high-fashion industry because there is a level of sophistication and a lot of money that is put into making it look that way. If I could only go to one, I think I would choose Hermes. I would just love to see actual rain falling inside in a controlled way, and seeing how the models and garments interact with it would be such a unique experience.