For the Spring Summer 2023 Miu Miu show at Auguste Perret’s Palais d’Iena in Paris, AMO collaborates with Chinese artist Shuang Li to create an immersive environment inspired by undersea infrastructure.
Black curtains wrap the perimeter of the palace lobby, and a uniform black rubber surface covers the floor, creating a dark stage illuminated by screens. A continuous tubular bench with fluorescent green rings snakes through the space like undersea cables laid on the ocean floor. Metal cages frame the columns and the walls, adding to the submarine atmosphere while emphasizing the monumental geometry of the hypostyle hall.
Models descend the grand staircase and emerge through a large transparent screen displaying Shuang Li’s videos. Other transparent screens are placed throughout the show space, acting as a digital veil that reveals glimpses of the palace’s architecture. The digital blends with the material as a reference to the physical dimension of today’s digital communication in a show that introduces a new relationship between guests, fashion and architecture.
The physical and virtual spaces of the Miu Miu show are punctuated with works by the artist Meriem Bennani, whose body of work explores intimate relationships mediated through the camera. Here, that idea is echoed and overlapped with another interrelation, of women and fashion. Conceived alongside the collection, Bennani commands control of the Miu Miu live stream via a series of filmic artistic interventions starring her own mother. These fantasy sequences are mixed real-time into the broadcast of the show to blur lines between virtual and real.
Underscoring these ideas, the interior of the Palais d’Iena is interrupted rather than transformed. Its architecture remains, a runway devised by AMO snaking through the centre, the audience balanced on Eames office chairs as an echo of the Palais’ continuing function as place of work. In the Palais, Bennani installs binocular-shaped screens to cut through the space, reforming and re-editing the physical experience of the show and projecting her films into real life. As with the clothing of the collection, these filmic cuts create a new work - editing reality, altering perceptions.
Fusing physical experience with digital, the staging of the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2021 show both addresses the unique demands of our time and the fundamental needs of the medium of the fashion show.
The show decor, realised by AMO, is an elliptical stadium, referencing the worlds of sports: as athletes act out their movements for an audience, they transform these spaces not only into a palace of sports, but an arena of observation. This is inherently tied with the experience of the runway show: in both, a group of people commune to not only bear witness but, in their presence, play a part in a collective moment.
Spring Summer 2020 Miu Miu
For the Spring Summer 2020 Miu Miu Show in the Palais d’Iena in Paris, AMO alters the rigor of August Perret’s Salle Hypostyle, inserting an off-centered installation of unbalanced monumentality. Using two of the three naves of the hall, the set subverts the original spatial organization of the Salle.
Two specular tribunes define a new hierarchy in the Palais, leaving a portion of the room open, while the other part is a compact linear set organized around an inlayed new floor.
The different elements of the set are all constructed in one industrial material: OSB wood, generating a gentle friction with the original materiality of the Palais. The sophisticated simplicity of the mono-material is enhanced by the use of architectural bas relief, defining every surface of the scene as a counterpart of Perret’s original concrete motifs.
A new curved wooden stair, inserted in the original grand staircase that visually concludes the Salle Hypostyle, becomes the focal point through its skewed direction and imbalance, elegantly converting the original symmetry of the room.
Based on this linear arrangement, the show unfolds around the re-cladded colonnade that becomes a central element outlining the model path, establishing a new relationship between the space and the fashion on display.
The OSB wood used for the set-up of the show will find new life after the event thanks to an association offering a service of collection, recovery of raw materials and decoration waste from fashion shows, making them available to professionals and students of the cultural sector.
Fall-Winter 2020 Miu Miu
For the Fall-Winter 2020 Miu Miu show, AMO confronts August Perret’s sober Palais d’Iena with a newfound sense of audacity, hijacking the surfaces of the architecture with new patterns, colors, and textures.
The first scene of intervention begins at the entrance, where the original white floor is covered by a bold decorative carpet, an antithesis in both form and material. As the carpet continues throughout the Palais, it invades the hypostyle and the “Pas Perdu”, wrapping along the entry and the Grand Stairs.
Other elements of the Palais, from the colonnade to the windows, are similarly confronted. Each of the existing columns is surrounded by metal frames equipped with LEDs, which sublimate each column into a geometry of bright pink light. At the bottom of every column, a velvet plinth becomes both a visual counterpart of the composition and a seating element. In between the columns, reclaimed cinema seating forms a dynamic milieu, creating a whimsical atmosphere inside the solemn Palais. Mirrors along the wall extend this mania to the infinite on either side, and provide the backdrop for the models walking the perimeter of the space.
This phantasm challenges the order and precision of modernism, as Miu Miu reclaims the Palais d’Iena for irreverence and play.
Elements used for the set-up of the show will find new life after the event thanks to an association offering a service of collection, recovery of raw materials and decoration waste from fashion shows, making them available to professionals and students of the cultural sector.
FW 2019 MiuMiu
For the FW 2019 MiuMiu show, AMO translates the vibrant work of Sharna Osborne into a three-dimensional collage that explores the power of images through different media. A curated selection of the photographer’s personal material provides an intimate angle on femininity that resonates with this year’s collection.
The monumental enfilade of the Salle Hypostyle is populated with a jumbled array of images. Giant prints, short video clips, old TVs and LED-screens produce a non-linear visual overload. The installation consists of an arrangement of frames, supports and structures that shape a chaotic ensemble of narratives.
Guests informally blend in the space, along the model path that unfolds playfully trough the hall. The catwalk is composed of a series of incidents that confront fashion and image in a vigorous dialogue.
A project with AMO
Photography by Agostino Osio and Alberto Moncada