‘VOGUE: Inventing the Runway’: A Whirlwind History of the Catwalk
A review of ‘VOGUE: Inventing the Runway’ at Lightroom, 2024.
On a a Friday night at Paris Fashion Week in 2023, Coberni brought its Spring/Summer show to a close by sending Bella Hadid, virtually nude, onto a mirrored platform. Two men in black then used an aerosol to spray-paint her with a white substance called Fabrican. The paint hardened into a dress, which was cut and adjusted. Now she found herself in an off-white, off-shoulder pencil dress with a thigh slit. Hadid later said there had been no rehearsal.
The clip went viral. For many it called to mind the Alexander McQueen show in Spring ’99, at which two robots covered Shalom Harlow’s strapless white dress in gray and green paint. But not everyone was impressed. Writing for Harper’s Bazaar, Rachel Tashjian asked, ‘Should fashion be stupid?’
What was the big idea behind this spray-on sheath? I struggled to see or feel anything other than discomfort at Hadid bending her arms and legs to the whims of these two men and their canisters. Hadid certainly looked fabulous, and clearly sold the idea to many; the whole charade left me convinced of only one thing, which is that Bella Hadid is a true supermodel. The show notes said that the collection was dedicated ‘to all the women in the world.’ Really? In that case, to me, the dress is a statement about how often women are gently manipulating themselves to accommodate the dumb ideas of men.
‘This was a gimmick, nothing more,’ she added.
For many it called to mind the Alexander McQueen show in Spring ’99.
You will have your own view. But the stunt was just the latest show of how designers were responding to a digitised modern world. VOGUE: Inventing the Runway, is the story of how we got here. It is a whistle-stop tour, narrated by Cate Blanchett, of the history of the catwalk, from the private ateliers of the Parisian Rive Droite to events of global interest in Paris and Milan.
Charles Frederick Worth, an English designer in Paris, was the father of haute couture. He dressed the élite, made custom pieces, and held private showings where models, called mannequins, wore his designs. These were the first runways. By the 1920s, Coco Chanel was holding runway shows at her apartment building at 31 Rue Cambon. A century later, Balenciaga was flooding the runway, and Alexander McQueen was hosting a show in an asylum.
Some designers have turned away from the grandiosity or gimmickry of, say, Louis Vuitton’s Rio de Janeiro show, or the Chanel show for which Karl Lagerfeld built a rocket inside the Grand Palais. ‘Sometimes, location is not about a grand destination,’ says Blanchett, ‘but rather, transporting us to places that are meaningful. As she speaks, all four walls of the Lightroom, which is a vast cube in which visitors are invited to walk around, fill with pictures of lavender, fields of which were the setting for Simon Porte Jacquemus’s 2020 Spring/Summer show. Martine Rose staged her show that same season on a street in Camden, north London.
Some designers have turned away from the grandiosity or gimmickry of, say, Louis Vuitton’s Rio de Janeiro show.
Some shows stand out. In 2010, Tom Ford invoked the private shows that began with Worth by hosting an invitation-only womenswear fashion show, his first, at New York Fashion Week. Pharrell Williams, in contrast, brought fashion to the masses with a show held on on the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. With all of these shows, we perceive the difference between creativity and mere originality. Like the neoclassical architect John Soames or T.S. Eliot, who marked the end of Georgian and start of Modernism in poetry, some designers seem to have history in their bones, and can ‘make it new’, as Ezra Pound put it: breathe new life into the old. Galliano reliably brought freshness and fun to his runway shows, often drawing on his time in the theatre. Patrick Kelly, who died at just 35, blew the world away with his joyful, colourful designs in Paris in 1980.
VOGUE: Inventing the Runway is not quite as immersive as Moonwalkers, the story of the Apollo missons which showed at Lightroom earlier this year. But it works, as when the whole space seems to be flooded during the Balenciaga show, or when the clothes worn by the runway models on the main wall are projected on the walls to either side. The whole thing runs for 55 minutes on a loop. And since you are in Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, you can grab a drink before or afterwards and take in the Christmas lights. If you’re in town, do go and see it.
