by Clinical, stripped-down runways appeared at Miu Miu and Courrèges, while Off-White and Dior opted for more luxurious ensembles for their Fall Winter 2023 collections at Paris Fashion Week.
Paris Fashion Week took place from February 27 to March 7 and was the final fashion event of the Fall Winter 2023 womenswear season.
This season brands have returned in a big way to using back-to-back catwalks as backdrops for their show spaces, as evidenced in shows from Loewe, Miu Miu, Courrèges and Marie Adam-Leenaerdt.
Other fashion houses, including Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton, used and reported more luxurious and ornate settings, presenting their shows in historical museums and in venues replicating motifs from grand ballrooms.
Off white
Off-White, a fashion brand founded by the late designer Virgil Abloh, held Fall Winter 2023 at the Tennis Club de Paris – a tennis club in the Porte de Saint-Cloud neighborhood of Paris founded in 1897.
The interior of the tennis club was transformed by the French production company Bureau Betak into a lunar setting with a giant mirror ball that had crashed into the center of the space. Reddish dust covered the club floor, with rocks like meteorites scattered across its surface between two rows of cubic seats.
Courrèges
A clinical white exhibition space, lit by a large light box, filled with smoke from racks on the floor for the Courréges Fall Winter 2023 womenswear show. It was designed by French creative studio Matière Noire and set designer and artist Rémy Briere, who transformed the Sorbonne University library into an arena-style venue.
“This dreamlike catwalk space was designed by artist Rémy Brière in collaboration with Matière Noire – a collective known for its ability to transform the immaterial into interactive objects of technical wonder,” Courrèges said in the show notes.
“This time again, a taming of natural forces – of light, mist, air – perpetuates a surreal, almost dystopian, vision of nature that reflects the intellectual developments of di Felice’s visual narrative.”
Dior
Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos collaborated with Dior to create a 24-meter-long, one-ton installation that was decorated with 20 different fabrics from the collection. The installation, titled Valkyrie Miss Dior and made entirely by hand, took an organic form consisting of fabric, lace and crochet.
Created for Dior’s Fall Winter 2023 womenswear show, which took place during Paris Fashion Week on February 28. The Valkyrie Miss Dior installation was placed in a purpose-built structure in the Jardin des Tuileries.
Saint Laurent
For Yves Saint Laurent’s couture collections, Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vaccarello recreated elements of the ballroom of the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris – where the brand would stage its haute couture collections between 1975 and 2001.
The show took place inside a purpose-built structure that boasted a contemporary black-box look from the outside, while the interior was decorated with a rich feel.
A series of large bronze chandeliers hung above a golden carpeted corridor that reflected endless mirrored screens in various parts of the exhibition space.
Miu Miu
Entitled Ways of Looking, the show took place inside the Palais d’Iéna – an art deco structure in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The collection and presentation centered around the idea of looking, seeing and observing and how these actions can change the perception of an object of focus.
The interior of the Palais had a stripped-back industrial set and was equipped with an elevated walkway, which the brand explained “aided our observation”.
Screens were suspended from truss boxes on the ceiling, playing installation works by South Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong, who uses her body and animatronics to examine the relationships between the human body and cloning.
Louis Vuitton
French artist Philippe Parreno and American production designer James Chinlund put an installation of a Parisian street in the highly elaborate salons of the Musée d’Orsay for Louis Vuitton’s Fall Winter 2023 collection.
The set replicated the rain-soaked cobblestones of Parisian streets and was combined with a soundscape of city sounds including footsteps of stones, cars and dogs, created by composer and sound engineer Nicolas Becker.
The runway installation contrasted sharply with the golden and opulent interiors of the Musée d’Orsay salons with their dark, black finishes combined with stark white lighting and sharp upholstery.
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt
Belgian fashion designer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt presented her first collection during Paris Fashion Week inside the Crowne Plaza Paris at Place de la Republique. The show took place in one of the hotel’s conference rooms and was reviewed by the French special events company Villa Eugénie.
Villa Eugénie filled the space with conference chairs that were stacked and stacked in the center of the room, around columns and in doorways in various positions and formations.
The chairs were also used as audience seats. Like the set, when creating the collection Adam-Leenaerdt looked at everyday objects to reverse their use and translate them into clothes.
Loewe
About ten tons of brightly colored confetti were pressed into large cubes at Loewe’s Fall Winter 2023 show, held on the Esplanade du Château de Vincennes during Paris Fashion Week.
Like the Spanish fashion house’s previous shows, the setting was a white box space with tiered seating. The space was dotted with 25 cubic confetti shapes by Italian artist Lara Favaretto that were almost a meter high.
