Across the Catwalk: Performance Innovation in the Fashion Runway Show

written by Miranda Allegar - July 18, 2020

Performance comes in many forms, faces, and fabrics. Much as theater necessitates not only a creative work, be it a play, musical, or improvised work, but also performers and an audience, so does the fashion world, coming to a pinnacle in the runway show where clothing, models, and spectators intersect. The audience, like in live theater, is crucial to the art form, as much a part of the experience as the garments themselves, with celebrities in attendance and reaction photographs splashed across tabloids as the models sashay past their voyeurs. The world of the fashion show is a theater unto itself, a place in which to see and be seen. 

Much like the theater world, the fashion world too was shaken by the unfolding pandemic, especially as travel bans rolled out, disrupting supply chains, distribution, and, most pertinently, the endless flow of global travel generated by the designers, models, and influencers crucial to the events. Typically, the fashion world is marked by biannual shows, taking place in both February and September across, but not limited to, the four major capitals of the industry: London, Paris, Milan, and New York. What happens then with the implementation of social distancing guidelines and closed borders?

To watch the fashion industry respond yields a wealth of ideas for the theater world to glean from the careful considerations already being rolled out in this seemingly disparate field. Many of the major fashion houses have opted for a blend of the digital and physical, presenting concept films to introduce collections or livestreaming their events across websites and social media platforms. This new wave of presentation resembles a myriad of forms– music videos, commercials, short films, and the most literal interpretation, the livestreamed catwalk. The fashion world reimagines old staples like models alongside dolls, mannequins, and the occasional narrative thread. These disruptions too have already done their part to wear away at the harsh confines of the cyclical fashion seasons of old, with brands like Louis Vuitton promising to do away with the old as their artistic director of menswear, Virgil Abloh, swears off the show calendars of a pre-COVID-19 world.

Similarly, as high fashion moves into a digital realm, it becomes accessible to the masses, to anyone with the technology in hand rather than just those with a coveted invitation for a chair marked with their name. Paralleling the conversations in the world of theater right now, what happens when the art comes to the masses in this way? How does this challenge what it means to put on a show, to entertain, to maintain the liveness that Vuitton’s CEO Michael Burke sees as so central to the form, stating in an interview with WWD that he thinks “fashion shows have to remain live. There has to be an audience. There has to be anticipation, there has to be tension, there has to be last-minute desperation. If you don’t have that, it’s like some of these football games that are being played with no audience — they have to pipe in the noise.”

Image: Still from the Louis Vuitton short film ‘Zoooom with Friends’

For Vuitton, while this means a break with the fashion calendar, it does not yet mark a break from the runway form. Instead, Burke and Abloh reveal their new concept for their spring 2021 menswear collection, a physical runway show that will travel the world, coming to its audiences rather than bringing its audience to any one location. The brand frames the change as a work-around to current travel restrictions. The shows will be open to the general public and will be live-streamed for the general public, following in the wake of the opening of this new collection: a short film, blending animation and live action, entitled “Zoooom with Friends.” No details have yet been provided about social distancing measures or any adaptation of the traditional runway showcase at these global pitstops of the collection. The collection stops first in Shanghai in early August.

Image: The three-dimensional invisible models show off the Pink Congo Label collection for Hanifa

Yet, other houses continue to push the boundaries of the typical fashion show in even more unexpected ways. Perhaps the most visually stunning collection of this season comes from Hanifa’s ready-to-wear collection, debuted this March on Instagram Live (@hanifaofficial). While the adaptation to social media live-streaming has become a “new normal,” the Pink Label Congo collection goes beyond, questioning liveness with a catwalk of “ghost” models, 3D renderings of the clothing strutting unassisted across a black space. The use of three-dimensional renderings in the fashion world, especially in the design process, is old-hat perhaps. The pre-pandemic world saw the global sensation of Lil Miquela, a CGI character debuted in 2016, who has since been featured in ads for Calvin Klein (recall her “kiss” with model Bella Hadid in this 2019 ad) and Prada’s 2018 collection.

Image: Lil Miquela and supermodel Bella Hadid kiss for Calvin Klein #mytruth campaign ad

Where Hanifa diverges from previous three-dimensional forays lies in the centering of the three-dimensional rendering as the final product, as a facsimile and replacement of the “live.” The collection’s presentation focuses entirely on the movement of the garments. These “ghost” models are not “influencers” lending their likeness to the project like the Miquela project, but an extension of the collection and its mood, a faceless and dedicated vector for the design.

Image: Loewe’s ’show-in-a-box’ for SS21

Completely shattering the mold of the fashion runway, Spanish luxury house Loewe eschewed the concept of modeled clothing and a gathered audience, physical or virtual, instead focusing on the experience of each “audience member” with the art. The brand deployed to its guests what it termed a “show-in-a-box,” a large archive box containing elements of the creative process, final product renderings, and even the sensory experiences of the collection. As reported by @dietprada, a notorious fashion blog with a following of 2.1 million, the box concept included more traditional program notes, flipbooks of the clothing modeled on mannequins, die-cuts to fold into three-dimensional representations of the modeled clothing, and representations of accessories. However, the box concept allowed for the inclusion of fabric swatches, inspiration photos, color palettes, and hand-crafted vinyl records of the soundtrack narrating the process taking place in their factories to be played on an included paper record player. The heart of the box came in a foldable miniature stage on which to create a tableau of the show in one’s own space, effectively bringing the show and the creative process into the homes of each recipient without interrupting the experience of discovering the new collection in real-time.

As the lines blur between our physical and virtual lives and we merge into the digital space, so too do the distinctions between art forms blur, all in search of retaining the connection between art and audience from an appropriate social distance. Theater bleeds into film, into audio recording, into technology. Perhaps this forced move online represents a conglomeration of some essence of “art as a practice,” distilling down similarities to this fundamental creator/receiver relationship and the looming question of how the hand-off may be made right now. In this landscape, the innovations and strides forward by one art form are valuable to all, another step in the grand experiment of performance within pandemic.