Inside the Temporary Worlds of Fashion Shows

At the Cour Carrée du Louvre, Louis Vuitton commissioned Jeremy Hindle, the production designer behind Severance, to build a sci-fi topography of valleys and ridges for its Fall-Winter 2026 show. Models moved through a seemingly pixelated, geometric landscape assembled from non-existant fragments of nature. The set didn’t frame the clothes so much as absorb them into its logic.

The process of creating these temporary universes starts, usually, with a feeling. Étienne Russo, the founder of Villa Eugénie and the man behind more than 1000 fashion shows over the past three decades, describes his first meeting on any new project the same way: “A brief is never a technical plan,” he says. “It’s an intuition.” He describes how the workroom fills with references and images, fragments of an atmosphere. Words are unreliable at this stage, because everyone projects their own universe onto them, whereas a photograph reduces that ambiguity. From there, the real question takes shape: what should a person feel the moment they walk through the door?

For Rod Reynolds, it begins with opening the right door. Reynolds is the founder of Records Collection, a studio that scouts off-market locations for fashion houses: buildings between demolition and renovation, spaces that aren’t advertised. “You walk down a street, open a door, you go up a floor, and suddenly there’s a thousand square meters at five meters of ceiling height,” he says. “The first contact, before the show even begins, is the space itself.” His network spans film location scouts, property developers and art foundations – anyone who might know about an empty building. Once a venue is confirmed, his team becomes the permanent link between the architecture and the brand, making sure the set design coexists with the building’s constraints without erasing what made it worth choosing.

Some houses strip a space to its skeleton and leave it largely untouched. At the Cour d’Appel de Paris, designer Mossi Traoré staged his show as an immersive courtroom scene, the institutional architecture untouched, left to speak for itself. However, other brands fill the space completely. Reynolds recalls a show by Japanese label Beautiful People, staged in Paris this past January in an unfinished building with wires hanging from the ceiling and walls half-painted. “A lot of houses would have tried to hide it, but they played with it instead,” he says.

For Pierre Dagba and Felix Ward, co-founders of the Paris studio Matière Noire, that instinct toward restraint runs deep. Their work starts from light rather than structure — the studio began designing lighting for clubs. Dagba trained as an architect and Ward comes from a background in set design and construction. Together, they describe their practice as somewhere between space design and what they call “atmospheric design,” more interested in what people feel than in what they can see and name. “We work with the intangible,” says Dagba. “Sound, light, video, atmospheric density. The question is always: how do you make the immaterial felt?”

Their answer this season, for Matières Fécales, was a single wooden disc, four meters across, painted in a pigment close to Vantablack, positioned to absorb light rather than reflect it. The idea was an eclipse staged indoors: the disc interrupting a light source, casting the room into an almost ceremonial darkness, as though something vast had passed overhead. “Sometimes a project with a single element has more impact than one with 10 times the budget,” says Dagba. “Radicality and simplicity. That’s what we hold onto.”

The show was held at the Palais Brongniart, Napoleon’s former stock exchange – a building imposing enough to set the tone before a single garment appeared. Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, the duo behind the label, structured the collection as a dissection of wealth and its pathologies: bourgeois archetypes in semi-couture silhouettes, pearl necklaces twisted into restraints, opera gloves streaked with blood. The audience sat in near-total darkness for thirty minutes. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who has spent millions pursuing radical life extension, appeared in the casting alongside Michèle Lamy, the two figures placed in silent counterpoint. When the lights finally shifted, the audience’s senses took a moment to readjust. 

What happens to the set afterward is a question the industry is only beginning to tackle. Russo describes sustainability as something his team now thinks through from the very first sketch. “We work more and more with reusable, modular, transformable materials,” he says. “We think about dismantling from the moment of conception.” This season at Marie-Adam Leenaerdt, guests left with their chairs, the object becoming a keepsake rather than more waste. 

Matière Noire has operated this way from the start. For an installation at the Fondation Cartier, Dagba and Ward sourced a kilometer of steel beams through a supplier, on the condition that every beam be returned at the end of the event. The studio has also turned down projects where they would handle only the lighting, while another team managed the set. The two things cannot be separated, says Ward. “It has to be a total vision.”

For Russo, that total vision extends beyond the show itself, to what it leaves behind in the minds of those who experienced it. “I watch people’s speed,” he says. “Their silence. Whether they stay or leave immediately.” A good set produces something close to disorientation, a slight shift in how the body moves through the world. “If conversations drop a tone when people enter, the space has taken control.”