Vogue: Inventing the Runway – Lightroom, London

Vogue: Inventing the Runway is the third of the highly imaginative immersive experiences created for London’s Lightroom – and it’s another breathtaking one. A collaboration between Vogue and Lightroom, it begins with signs that beguilingly lead you ‘Backstage’. You’re taken along dark corridors, hearing the excited chatter of a fashion show audience just out of sight. A handwritten sign is pinned to a wall, exhorting the models to smile. When you reach the Lightroom itself, the show is already in full swing. But there’s no need to feel you’ve missed out: it’s on a continuous loop.

You can sit where you like or move around. The walls are continuously flooded with vivid imagery, a lot of which comes from Vogue’s archives. There’s a powerfully immersive soundtrack with a musical score which fuses original composition with pop music and some thrilling classical tracks.

Of the great designers of the last 100 years, fashion historians may take issue with who’s included and who’s left out. But in a 50-minute show, we’re given a rich kaleidoscope of some of twenty- and twenty-first-century fashion’s most iconic shows. There is a distinct structure without a dogged insistence on chronology. With sections that include Story and Spectacle, On Location, The Audience and Disrupters, you’ll get a clear sense of how the fashion industry grew out of its early origins in Paris to the global phenomenon it now is. More importantly, Inventing the Runway highlights moments of real change.

Strangely, the moment when the first designer makes use of the newly invented internet is comically dull. Helmut Lang temporarily abandons the fashion show itself, instead uploading each season’s collections in its entirety onto a CD-ROM. All we see are images of the old-fashioned interface as someone types in ‘Helmut Lang.’ Move forward to 2010, and we get a fabulous glimpse of Alexander McQueen’s groundbreaking show, Plato’s Atlantis – the first fashion show to be live-streamed, thus allowing us all to be in the front row of fashion’s hitherto closed world. And it’s stunning. Robot-mounted cameras run on tracks, and the fashions are fantastically bonkers. It’s the moment McQueen’s armadillo shoes burst on the world. And there’s another phenomenon – McQueen invites the not-then-well-known Lady Gaga to premier her new single, Bad Romance, as the show’s soundtrack.

Show after show dazzles with the sheer inventiveness of each creator. This is fashion as performance art: ’10 minutes of pure theatre,’ as Vogue says of McQueen’s endless shock tactics. There’s a section on Karl Lagerfeld’s huge shows for Paris’s Grand Palais, which he once memorably transformed into a beach. John Galliano’s Maison Margiela for Spring 2024 is astonishing, his otherworldly models (a shout out to top make-up artist Pat McGrath for her porcelain-doll skin) somehow becoming both louche Parisian low life and creatures of wondrous beauty.

The advent of the smartphone comes with its own issues. The commentary, voiced by Cate Blanchett, suggests that the medium itself now influences fashion, with images on social media favouring that which is most colourful. One wonders how the elegant monochromes of Comme Des Garçons, Fall 1982, would fare now. At the same time, how intriguing that The Row: Resort 2025 invites its select audience to put away their phones and instead sketch what they see (paper and pencils provided).

Go and see Vogue: Inventing the Runway, and be prepared to be blown away.

Continues until 24 April 2025