the runway tells you where to look: 10 fashion shows that rewrote the catwalk
the path of the runway rewritten
Fashion shows typically begin with a straightforward diagram. Models move along a prescribed path, its edges lined with spectators, and everyone knows where to look. In general this basic layout has remained consistent across time. Yet some of the strongest runway sets begin by disturbing that diagram.
Across four decades, designers and scenographers have buried the catwalk beneath the floor, broken it into a grid, or removed the act of walking all together. In these shows, set design shapes much more than just a decorative backdrop. It determines when a model appears and how long they stay visible. It can even determine whether two viewers sitting a few feet apart experience the same sequence. During this season of fashion weeks, we return to ten examples where the runway itself became part of the choreography.
thierry mugler turns the catwalk into an arena
For Thierry Mugler’s fall 1984 show at Le Zénith in Paris, the runway unfolded through the concert venue like a pair of wings. It was one of the first examples of a runway show dreaming beyond the quiet, standard setup. More than 6,000 people filled the room, including paying members of the public, pushing the fashion show beyond the scale of the usual industry presentation. Models could appear at different points across the extended stage, and the audience watched from a wide field instead of a narrow strip beside the garments.
The plan suited Mugler’s theatrical language, but its effect was spatial first. Distance became part of the show. A figure could register as a silhouette from across the arena before moving closer into view, while the runway reached outward toward spectators instead of holding them along one straight edge. The traditional catwalk had been stretched into something closer to a diagram for a crowd.
Thierry Mugler Fall/Winter 1984, Paris | image © Paul van Riel / HH
maison martin margiela shares the runway with its audience
Maison Martin Margiela’s spring/summer 1990 show, presented in fall 1989, moved fashion onto a playground in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. Local children sat along the dirt paths, then began moving among the models as the show continued. The route never hardened into a polished runway. It remained part of the ground everyone was already occupying.
The photographs are completely changed because of that looseness. Models pass close to seated guests, children enter the frame, and the edge between watcher and participant keeps shifting. The runway becomes shared territory. Instead of a protected corridor cut through an audience, Margiela works with a path that can be crossed, crowded, and briefly taken over.
Martin Margiela Spring/Summer 1990, Paris | image © Jean-Claude Coutausse
viktor & rolf stop the runway entirely
Viktor & Rolf pushed the idea in another direction for their fall 1999 couture collection, Russian Doll. Maggie Rizer stood on a rotating platform while Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren dressed her layer by layer, building the collection onto a single body. There was no procession of models moving past the audience. The audience kept returning its gaze to the same point.
The rotating platform turns the usual relationship between clothing and movement inside out. Rizer stays almost fixed while the silhouette expands around her, and the show advances through accumulation instead of distance. The catwalk has effectively collapsed into a circle a few feet wide.
Viktor & Rolf, Russian Doll, Fall/Winter 1999–2000 | video still
alexander mcqueen turns the gaze back on the room
Alexander McQueen’s spring/summer 2001 show, Voss, begins before a model appears. Guests sit around a huge two-way mirrored box and see their own reflections staring back at them. Once the lights shift, the interior becomes visible from outside, while the models inside remain unable to see the audience.
McQueen takes the separation already built into a runway and makes it physical. The model route is contained inside the box, the spectators stay outside it, and the glass controls who gets to see whom. The audience moves from watching itself to observing bodies that cannot return the gaze. Few runway designs make the mechanics of spectatorship so visible.
Alexander McQueen, Voss, Spring/Summer 2001 | image courtesy Alexander McQueen
prada breaks the front row into a field
For Prada men’s spring/summer 2012, AMO treated seating and catwalk as a single plan. Six hundred guests sat on individual blue foam blocks spaced across a 1.5-by-1.5-meter grid, while models followed several choreographed routes through the gaps. Artificial grass covered the floor, turning the hall into a strangely ordered field.
There is no single runway edge to claim. A model might pass directly beside one spectator, then turn through the grid and move toward another. From above, the set reads almost like graph paper filled with people. At eye level, it creates a sequence of brief encounters. The audience is no longer arranged around the route. It helps form the route.
Prada, Field, Men’s Spring/Summer 2012, set design by OMA / AMO, Prada Fondazione, Milan © OMA | image by Agostino Osio
anya hindmarch hides a spiral beneath the floor
At first glance, Anya Hindmarch’s spring/summer 2017 set looked almost empty. A white circular platform sat in the Royal Horticultural Halls in London. When the show began, the platform lifted to reveal a sunken amphitheater and a spiral path beneath it, with a model ascending through the newly opened center. Above, a circular canopy rotated and tilted as the show progressed.
The surprise works because the runway begins as concealed architecture. Its route appears only once the floor moves, turning an apparently flat stage into a section of ramps and levels. Models circle upward through the space, and spectators read their movement across depth as well as distance. The runway is discovered during the show.
Anya Hindmarch, Circulus, Spring/Summer 2017 | image © Neil Mason
dior puts the runway itself in motion
For Dior Men’s fall 2019 show, Kim Jones replaced the conventional catwalk with a 76-meter moving walkway inside a dark box. The models stood still as the belt carried them past the audience, posed almost like figures in a long moving frieze. Jones linked the format to couture salon presentations, where clothing could be observed on relatively stationary bodies.
It is a small reversal with a strange effect. Walking, usually the basic action of a runway, disappears. The floor controls speed and direction instead, sending each look past the same line of viewers at an even pace. The model becomes stationary and the architecture takes over the choreography.
Dior Men’s, Fall/Winter 2019-2020 | video still
balenciaga winds the audience into a double spiral
Balenciaga’s spring/summer 2020 show filled a 2,000-square-meter room with around 500 seats arranged as an elliptical double spiral. Guests sat in a single row that climbed across five levels, all inside a field of saturated blue conceived in reference to a parliamentary chamber. The corridors created by that seating system became the catwalk.
The spiral removes the easy distinction between runway center and audience edge. Spectators face across the room toward one another, while models wind through the same geometry at changing distances. A person several turns away can enter your sightline long before reaching your section. The show becomes something seen across layers of other spectators.
Balenciaga Spring/Summer 2020, set design by SUB | image © Boris Camaca
dior opens the floor beneath the entire cast
Dior Men’s summer 2024 presentation initially offered a broad field of polished metal tiles. Then 51 panels slid open in a three-by-seventeen grid and the full cast rose from beneath the runway on individual lifts. For a few seconds, the collection appeared all at once across the floor before the models began moving through the show.
The entrance usually sits at the end of a runway, somewhere backstage and outside the audience’s view. Here, every point on the floor becomes an entrance. The first image is spatial as much as sartorial: 51 bodies distributed across a precise grid, each occupying a position that had appeared empty seconds earlier.
Dior Men’s summer 2024, set design by Villa Eugénie | image © Adrien Dirand
willo perron sends chanel across two crossing ramps
For Chanel’s spring/summer 2025 haute couture show, Willo Perron laid two broad curving ramps through the Grand Palais. Together they traced Chanel’s double C into a figure-eight path, with the walkways rising and crossing over one another like bridges. The runway became a continuous loop with models moving through changing heights and directions.
Seen from above, the structure reads immediately as geometry. From a seat beside it, that geometry becomes circulation. One model climbs while another passes through a different section of the curve, and the crossing ramps create views above and across the audience’s usual eye line. Perron turns the catwalk from a strip of floor into a route with elevation and overlap.
Chanel Spring/Summer 2025, set design by Willo Perron | image courtesy Chanel
This article is part of designboom’s SPECTATOR AND SPECTACLE chapter, asking how wonder gets built, presented in partnership with SolidNature, and how it might return some mystery to a world that has measured most of it away. Discover more stories that turn onlookers into participants, alter perception and disrupt the everyday here.
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