Last Updated on January 9, 2025
Kings Cross Immersive Film Experience
The runway fashion show is an underappreciated art form. Whilst a plain white backdrop with models strutting along to loud music is the familiar cliché, “Vogue: Inventing the Runway” demonstrates how varied and inventive the techniques used to stage a fashion collection’s launch can be.
Lightroom, an immersive digital art projection venue, close to Granary Square at Kings Cross, is housing the fifty-minute show until April 2025. It’s an exciting display for fashion fans that would pair well with a theatre visit to The Devil Wears Prada or simply a shopping blow-out at the nearby Coal Drops complex.
Imagine a cube-shaped space, four storeys high, with white walls and digital film projections surrounding you on each side, including the ceiling and floor. The film lasts around fifty minutes; with different footage on each side, visitors can stay to watch again as the footage and audio repeat in a loop. There’s a lot to take in; I sat through two full rotations, watching the loose narrative come full circle. Visitors can come and go or switch seats throughout.
Whilst billed as history, there is much focus on the last decade – to capture Gen Z’s attention – although the 80s and 90s are well represented. The most recent fashion show mentioned (but poignantly not seen), is The Olsen Twins’ 2024 collection launch which took place in a closed room where mobile phones were banned, and paper and pencils handed out to the audience. This echoes early Paris couture salons, which showed new designs exclusively to wealthy customers invited to their ateliers. In those days, we are told, even journalists were not allowed to see the designs until weeks later, and coverage appeared considerably later in black and white magazines.
The style of fashion coverage is shown to evolve to a model as famous as Cindy Crawford becoming a media personality in her own right, hosting TV shows. Thierry Mugler became the first designer to have a show broadcast live on French television in 1995; the internet age saw Helmut Lang show his collection on a website and posting CD-ROMs to the media. The Covid pandemic led to designers seeking alternate methods to show collections using Barbie dolls during lockdown; this is similar to when the post-war Paris fashion shows took place in exhibition form using small dolls because fabrics were still rationed. Shows these days – Olsen Twins aside – are social media catnip. American musician Pharrell Williams, now creative director at Louis Vuitton, took over the Pont Neuf in Paris for his first heavily celebrity-endorsed runway show. Compare this with the young Azzedine Alaïa, using his own kitchen, just over the Seine in the Marais.
A highlight of Inventing the Runway was footage of Karl Lagerfeld’s phenomenal Paris Grand Palais spectacles for Chanel, in which he turned the space into a realistic casino, supermarket and even a rocket launch pad. A chapter explores fashion shows taking place in outdoor locations around the world: Versace at Cannes, Dior in Mumbai, Jacquemus in a lavender field.
More locally, Martine Rose showing streetwear in a Camden cul-de-sac. If you’ve ever wanted a seat next to Vogue Editor Anna Wintour on the “F’row”, Inventing the Runway gives a sense of what watching a fashion show would be like.
Inventing the Runway has a celebratory tone. There may be a 360-degree view on the walls, but arguably we are wearing blinkers. Alexander McQueen and John Galliano each have segments devoted to them, yet no commentary is given about whether the strain of producing fashion collections and shows of this calibre contributed to their respective mental health crises. Top designers may work on as many as nine or ten shows each year; the personal toll is considerable. Both of these designers have featured in their own documentaries, telling their stories more appropriately. It’s still a point worth making that there’s often a human cost to creating this art that the audio track – a mix of Cate Blanchett narration and celebrity quotes – fails to discuss.
Outside Inventing the Runway, there’s a splendid gift shop with an excellent selection of fashion-related coffee table volumes and some Vogue-branded clothing. A nice touch is two make-up tables set up, as if backstage at a real show. Above is a sign saying, “Astronauts don’t wear make-up”, referring to Lightroom’s parallel program, “The Moonwalkers,” with Tom Hanks’ narration about the Apollo space program, which shows in the morning. Presumably, merchandise is being wheeled in and out twice daily to match each film. Between them, the two films and gift shops can appeal to a very broad audience. A staff member told me that people have cried during the moon film, nevertheless, I found Vogue: Inventing the Runway equally moving.
Vogue: Inventing the Runway (until 26 April 2025)
The Light Room
12 Lewis Cubitt Square
London N1C 4DY
Tel: 0300 303 4216
Leave a Reply