nventing the Runway traces the evolution of the fashion presentation from the salons of Charles Frederick Worth to the CD-ROMs of Helmut Lang – with some of the greatest catwalk shows ever staged reimagined in Lightroom’s immersive gallery space in King’s Cross. Here, a closer look at five of the history-making collections projected on its 12-metre-high walls.

Alexander
McQueen, Spring/Summer 1999

Staged in Gatliff Warehouse, a disused bus depot near Victoria station, Alexander McQueen’s 13th show was inspired by everything from the Arts & Crafts movement to the prosthetic limbs developed at Queen Mary’s Hospital during “The Great War”. Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins opened the show wearing a pair of cherrywood legs that recalled the carvings of 17th-century sculptor Grinling Gibbons, while Shalom Harlow closed No 13 with a finale that still lingers in mind. Stepping onto a rotating disk in a white trapeze dress, the model stood in place as two robots brought in from a car manufacturing plant sprayed her aggressively with black and Brat-green paint. McQueen later claimed the performance had been inspired by Rebecca Horn’s High Moon (1991), and told ArtReview that it took a full week to programme the robots – and yet he refrained from giving Harlow any instructions about how to respond to them on the night. “Alexander and I didn’t have any conversation directly related to this particular piece and to creating this moment within this show,” she recalled ahead of the opening of the Savage Beauty retrospective. “I like to think that he wanted to interfere as little as possible and allow me to have the most genuine, spontaneous experience as possible.”

Hussein Chalayan, Autumn/Winter 2000

“My family did experience displacement,” British-Cypriot designer Hussein Chalayan recalls in Inventing the Runway. “They had to leave their homes. And then I was, you know, wanting to explore that idea of how you protect your possessions, how you may also want to carry them if you’re leaving.” For autumn/winter 2000, that exploration took the form of a presentation at Sadler’s Wells in London’s Islington. The theatre’s stage had been rearranged to resemble a living room, around which models walked in shift dresses, ruffled skirts, trench coats – and, finally, the furniture itself. “Chalayan’s finale was quite astonishing,” wrote Plum Sykes in an American Vogue review at the time. “Four models clad in chic grey shift dresses approached the set of chairs, removed the covers and literally put them on. The chair covers became perfect versions of the shifts they were already wearing. The last model stepped inside the table, lifted it up, and it transformed into a wooden skirt (the real fashion insider will remember Chalayan’s graduation show included a wooden skirt, too). Finally, the chairs folded into suitcases, which were carried off the stage; the television screen disappeared; and we were left looking at an empty room. If it sounds like magic, that’s because it was.”

Tom Ford, Spring/Summer 2011

When debuting his first womenswear collection in six years, Tom Ford rebelled against the immediacy and uniformity of fashion shows in the Aughts. He dreamt up the concept for his spring/summer 2011 presentation, held in his Madison Avenue store, on a Eurostar – deciding to eschew models in favour of 32 “icons”, from Marisa Berenson to Beyoncé to Stella Tennant. “I wanted all different ages, I wanted all different body types, I wanted different characters and different personalities,” he told WWD in the wake of the show, photographs of which were prohibited. “I literally designed those clothes for those women – took their measurements, thought about them, thought about what they wore.” Beyoncé – then on hiatus before recording 4 – wore a silver jacquard dress, with Ford narrating her turn on the runway for the 100-odd editors present. When The New York Times asked her afterwards whether she thought twice about being in the show, she replied immediately: “Absolutely not; look at these clothes!”

Chanel, Autumn/ Winter 2017

Karl Lagerfeld created entire worlds within the Grand Palais when presenting his Chanel collections; recall his supermarché for autumn/winter 2014, whose shelves were lined with Jambon Cambon, Délice de Gabrielle tuna, and Haute Ketchup. In Inventing the Runway, Vogue homes in on the No 5 Launch Pad for autumn/winter 2017, which saw a 35-metre-tall rocket “launched” towards the Palais’s Art-Nouveau ceiling as Elton John’s ‘Rocketman’ played in the background. “It was something I thought up months ago – and suddenly everybody is doing,” said the prescient designer ahead of the 7 March presentation, which happened mere weeks after NASA announced the discovery of three planets orbiting Trappist-1b that could potentially support life. As for the clothes: there were space blankets and astronaut collars, solar tweeds and rocket minaudières… Lagerfeld later claimed his designs were inspired by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who had been sending regular dispatches from the International Space Station in the months leading up to the show.

Balenciaga, Autumn/ Winter 2020

Demna brought editors to the Cité du Cinema Studios in Saint-Denis for autumn/winter 2020, where he had built a runway – and dramatically flooded it. Not only were the front rows submerged, with models splashing editors as they made their way down the catwalk in Wellington boots and scuba gear, but an LED ceiling depicted swirling images of impending climate doom. “Finding our way to our seats at Balenciaga this morning was perilous business,” British Vogue’s Sarah Harris wrote in a dispatch after the show. “It was pitch black, there were steps to navigate and all we could make out as a runway was a vast pool of water, which took on a menacing shade of inky black in the darkness… Excruciating music reverberated, the lights came up and cloud graphics moved quickly overhead. That digital weather system moved from racing clouds to an impressive murmuration of starlings, an apocalyptic storm to a fiery sunset.” As for the clothes? There were football kits, FiveFingers-style shoes and neogothic power suits.

Courtesy: British Vogue

Houses and designers

Inventing the Runway reveals how fashion shows became the ultimate statement of a designer’s vision – at times, a walking expression of their identity – reimagined season after season and year after year. The show features the work of the most significant creative minds in fashion history, including:

Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, Burberry, Chanel, Chloé, Christian Dior, Christopher John Rogers, Comme des Garçons, Coperni, Courrèges, Dolce & Gabbana, Dries Van Noten, Fendi, Givenchy, Gucci, Helmut Lang, Hood by Air, Hussein Chalayan, Iris Van Herpen, Jacquemus, Jean Paul Gaultier, Junya Watanabe, Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Maison Margiela, Marc Jacobs, Martine Rose, Miu Miu, Moschino, Patou, Prada, Pyer Moss, Rick Owens, Saint Laurent, Schiaparelli, Stella McCartney, Thierry Mugler, Thom Browne, Tomo Koizumi, Undercover, Versace, Victoria Beckham, Vivienne Westwood, Willy Chavarria, Yohji Yamamoto.