ACNE STUDIOS SHOWS WHAT A RUNWAY SET CAN BECOME WHEN MUSIC PLAYS A PRIMARY ROLE
Photo Courtesy of Back of the House
21 mar 2022, for frame
Site
145 Bd Malesherbes, 75017 Paris, France
Design, Production
Brand
Music
Suzanne Ciani
Acne Studios' set for its AW22 Paris presentation took influence from the show's soundtrack, conceived by electronic musician Suzanne Ciani.
Key features
Back of the House designed and produced Acne Studios’ womenswear show for the AW22 season. The event took place at the Lycée Carnot in Paris, one of the city’s most prominent high schools. Its hall – covered with a glass-and-metal roof designed by Gustave Eiffel and measuring 80 by 30 m – often serves as the site for fashion shows. For the Acne Studios AW22 space, the original building was used an envelope exerting very little influence on the set itself. The minimalistic white build-up was defined by the DJ table of Suzanne Ciani, a pioneer of electronic music, who played music during the catwalk. Guests were seated in small, fur-clad spectator boxes sunken beneath the ‘dancefloor’.
Frame's take
The white space was a stage for Suzanne Ciani's most-used instrument – the Buchla modular synthesizer – and, at the same time, for patchwork techniques used in Acne Studios' AW22 collection, wherein denim, jersey and leather manipulated into something new. The objective of the show was to illustrate the fashion process by creating genre-defying music compositions on the site. Consequently, the shaping of the scene was regarded as an independent process, constrained only by the extent of the existing spatial volume. As a result, the set became a distinctive medium to visually distinguish Ciani’s music and the craft behind Acne’s collection.