The invitation said 7pm and gave an address in the eleventh. What happened at 7pm was twenty-two minutes of light, sound and eleven performers in what were unmistakably not the season's clothes, followed by a standing ovation and a great deal of confused conversation on the pavement outside. The collection itself was released as a lookbook at midnight.
The argument for it
The case is straightforward and not stupid. A runway show costs a fortune, communicates poorly, and is watched by most people as a series of nine-second video clips. If the actual commercial function is to generate images and a mood, then a piece of performance that generates better images and a stronger mood is arguably doing the job more efficiently, and for less money.
It certainly generated the images. The clips travelled further in twenty-four hours than anything else that week. What it did not do is tell anybody what the clothes were like, and the midnight lookbook — competent, quiet, considerably better than the performance implied — was read by a fraction of the people who watched the video.
“If nobody can remember a single garment, we have made an advert for ourselves and not for the collection.”
A rival house's creative director, unprompted
The argument against
Buyers still have to buy. Three we spoke to had already seen the collection in the showroom and were relaxed; two had not, and were irritated at being asked to form a view from a PDF. There is also a longer-term cost: a house that trains its audience to expect spectacle has to keep escalating, and that arms race has bankrupted better-funded businesses than this one.
The cost question is worth putting plainly. Two producers estimated the performance ran to somewhere between a third and a half of a conventional show budget, which is a genuine saving. It also required a director, a composer and eleven performers, none of whom will be available at that price once four other houses try the same thing next season.
The precedent it sets
Whatever you make of it, the format is now available and will be used. Two other houses had already scheduled something structurally similar for next season before this one happened, and at least one has since briefed a director. The genuinely interesting question is not whether the performance was good but what happens to the shows that stay conventional once several of their competitors have moved to something that generates three times the video reach.
The likely answer is a split, and it may be healthy. Houses whose business is genuinely about clothing may find they get more from a small, well-lit presentation where buyers can see the cloth, while those whose business is largely about image move fully into spectacle. Both are honest positions. What is not sustainable is the current arrangement, where an enormously expensive runway show is asked to do both jobs and does neither especially well.
For balance: the collection itself was good. Reading the lookbook properly the next morning, there were at least three garments in it that would have been among the strongest things shown that week, including a coat that does the outward-shoulder trick better than anyone else managed. Almost nobody saw them. That is the clearest possible statement of what the format cost, and it was entirely self-inflicted.
Our honest verdict is that it worked as marketing and failed as a show. Whether those are the same job is the actual question the industry has been avoiding for about five years, and this was the most expensive way yet of not answering it.
