1,750 guests watched Pharell Williams’s Louis Vuitton debut from the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. Over one billion people watched on social media.
Over time, the fashion show has developed from an intimate affair reserved for wealthy clients to a globally recognisable spectacle, impacting culture and society. Viewers outside of the industry now have almost-instant access to these previously closed-off runways via brands’ owned social channels, not to mention those of the press, celebrities and influencers in attendance. But what is the purpose of a fashion show today, and who is it for?
It’s the theme of a new immersive exhibition, ‘Vogue: Inventing the Runway’, which will premiere on 13 November at London’s Lightroom, an immersive experience venue right in the shadow of Central Saint Martins, where many of the 60 designers featured in the exhibition studied. Tickets, which range from £15 to £25, are on sale until 26 April 2025.
The spectacles draw on Vogue’s vast archives (which date back to its first publication in 1892) and contributor network, bringing together the perspectives of leading industry voices, with narration from two-time Academy Award-winning actor and producer Cate Blanchett.
“We all learnt so much through [putting the exhibition together],” says Laura Ingham, deputy director of Vogue’s global fashion network. “It was great to deep dive into the research that you don’t normally have time to do when you’re doing a shoot or putting together a show.”
Lightroom hasn’t traditionally been a space for fashion exhibitions. Since opening in February 2023, the immersive space has worked with artists and companies across art, music, film and science. Recent exhibitions include a Tom Hanks-narrated experience of original NASA footage in The Moonwalkers, which details the stories of the Apollo missions, and a journey through the work of artist David Hockney (Lightroom’s debut show).
The exhibition has been in the works for a year and a half. “Fashion is a great subject matter [for an immersive exhibition] because of the rich mix of media — from illustration and archive to video and photography,” says David Sabel, executive producer at Lightroom. “It felt like at that scale, you could do something really fun. So I thought, who would the best partner be? And that seemed to be Vogue.”