Alexandre de Betak is the Guy Who Brings Fashion’s Vision to Life

Any fashionista worth their Fendi fur keychain knows that runway shows aren’t just about the clothes. There are also the models, the front row, and of course the sets, which can be so mind-bending that it’s like entering a parallel reality. A magical set is a way of enhancing the storytelling and searing the event into the memory of both the physical audience and the infinite number of virtual guests reachable through social media.

Fashion show and event producer extraordinaire Alexandre de Betak is the man who makes these designers’ fantasies a reality. This season alone, he wowed the fashion crowd with his jaw-dropping Dior Mountain: a huge blue 59 foot-high mound that greeted visitors to the French fashion houses’s Spring-Summer 2016 show, covered in 400,000 blue delphiniums and four kilometers of grass. The bucolic vision — set slap bang in the middle of the Carré du Louvre (i.e. the Louvre’s courtyard!) — looked as if it had emerged from the earth’s center over night. Guests flowed through a short white tunnel in its center, opening out to a bright white tent where a group of blue construction cranes, stacked with runway spotlights like Sci-Fi blooms, waited to swoop after the models. It took a 100-strong team to construct the set, working day and night across three weeks, with a further 10 days spent dismantling it. (A mighty long time considering that a fashion show flashes by in about 12 minutes or less.)

It was all in a day’s work for de Betak, 47, who has been in the business since he was 18 years old, with some 900 show productions under his belt and counting. Other shows this season included Carven, Jacquemus (held in a tent and starring a white horse), and Isabel Marant (an open-air show in Paris’s Palais Royal gardens). In between he managed to concept and execute the opening night gala for the new season of the Paris Opera Ballet under Benjamin Millepied, in collaboration with graffiti artist-turned entrepreneur André Saraiva.

Incredibly, after all these years in the business, de Betak’s creative energy hasn’t dimmed. He approaches each project with the same focus and passion going into mega-budget productions (like the Victoria’s Secret show that famously crashed the company’s website in 2000) as on smaller, human-size projects with the likes of Rodarte, Jason Wu, and Mary Katrantzou. Ever cucumber-cool, the affable producer is one of fashion’s most familiar faces, be it at the shows — pacing the floor, with his light stubble and black leather jacket, Clearcom headset clamped to his head — or hobnobbing at the major parties, as someone who likes to balance work and play. With the fashion season wrapped, de Betak got on the phone from his vacation home in Majorca to talk robots and exploding jellyfish tanks with Yahoo Style.

Yahoo Style: How can you describe what you do each fashion season to someone who’s not from that universe?

Alexandre de Betak: Fashion weeks - or fashion months, because we did New York, London, Milan and Paris, is very hard to describe, it’s like a giant moving summer camp with lots of activity! Fashion month is very intense, but the truth is it never stops with all the different events and fashion collections throughout the year.

And mounting these show sets, with several on the go at any one time, is it like a Broadway production?

It’s not like Broadway or a concert or the theater as you only do it once and you don’t really get to rehearse it – you always have models showing up late and all that. It’s not spontaneous either, it’s very planned, everything is calculated and timed, but it’s a one-off event that is hardly rehearsed so it’s really its own animal.

How did you get into this?

Kind of by chance, I started doing photography as a kid and that led me to go to Madrid in Spain before I had finished school, and that’s where I met Sybilla, an important fashion designer who was just starting out. I very spontaneously offered to help out then one day she came back to Paris and called me and said ‘I’ll take you up on your offer.’ And that’s kind how it started, she was very small so I was doing a mix of improvised art direction and PR and then it grew slowly and we started doing fashion shows.

But before that were you putting on school productions or anything?

Actually I was putting on parties and building and programming my own comet lights for dance parties as a teenager. I guess there was a bit of that. As a kid I had a buzzer on my door with a green, red and yellow light and a microphone and a few speakers… And I kind of still do a lot of stuff with electronics and inventions.

So you’re a bit of a mad scientist? You collected robots as a kid, right?  

Yes, when I did the house here in Majorca I made docks in stones for the iPods and I’ve done all this weird electronic programmed stuff mixed with stone or clay, and made a special dimmer. There’s a lot of stuff like that that I still do that I guess is linked to what doing shows is all about. Doing shows is a great platform for using all of this.

When it comes to ideas for shows sets, is the sky the limit?

No, I’ve been told no before, because it’s too complicated or expensive. The sky is the limit when it comes to complications, even though there are amazing budgets they are never going to be large enough for what you want to do. They could always be larger and we could always do more.

How high can it go?

When you know what goes into it, it goes pretty quickly. But more importantly sometimes shows with amazingly small budgets can be incredibly efficient. I remember doing shows for Hussein Chalayan in the 90s, and for Viktor and Rolf or Rodarte, that made a great impact and cost hardly anything, and even for Dior we’ve done amazing shows with John [Galliano] in the past and Raf [Simons] recently where people have thought they cost 10 times what they did. The truth is it’s an issue and a non-issue at the same time.

I read that watching the 1989 Bicentennial Parade in Paris, choreographed by Jean-Paul Goude, to mark the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, was a major light bulb moment for you. What’s your relationship to showmanship and what do you hope to have brought to the history of fashion shows?

It’s a good question. Well I’m still here - I haven’t gone yet! Hopefully I will have helped bring some more memories, moving memories. I started out by kind of breaking molds and trends. My first shows were in New York at the very beginning of the 90s when New York Fashion Week started and they were kind of still very 80s and I started doing very androgynous, minimal, modern and I guess kind of manly shows for Miu Miu, Prada, and Helmut Lang when he arrived. But then there were also the first theatrical fun shows like for John Bartlett. I remember amazing shows in the early 90s when we used a human wall of boys, and horses - you name it. It was basically about bringing new elements to the shows that both enhanced the message and image of the collection and the brand but at the same time helped the audience memorize it better and have a better time; it’s as simple as that. Whether it makes you happy or sad, it helps bring some emotions. Which ultimately would make the experience more memorable.

Tell us about the process, does it always begin with meeting the client and discussing a brief? How did the Dior mountain come about, was it Raf Simons’ idea?

It’s the same for Raf’s as his inspirations for his collections. We start with his ideas for the coming show and then play around. We went through a lot of different things. Since Raf arrived at Dior what we’ve done together has often come back to that mix of architecture and nature and very often to a flower-based way of presenting - whether it’s very architectural like we did for the previous show in the Louvre or whether it’s full-on like the first couture or this one that’s a mix. It’s always a very personal combination of the things he likes but in a very rough, raw, light-hearted manner. In the end it’s very simple: it’s a mountain covered in wild blue delphiniums.

Is it your role to enhance the show and collection through sets?

Of course it’s always about the collection, but even more so it’s my role to always contribute to the story and DNA of the brand and the evolution of the designer within the brand.

What’s the most challenging show you’ve ever done, technically-speaking?

I think the most challenging show is still to come - it’s probably what keeps me here. The first Dior Couture show with Raf – with the rooms covered in flowers – was incredibly challenging because we used fresh flowers so had to leave installing them to the last possible moment, with thousands of square feet of walls to cover. We had to find a way of doing it without damaging the space, which was an historic venue, and without damaging the flowers so that they would be as fresh and beautiful as possible on the day of the show.

It seems like there’s this whole one-upmanship thing going on between the luxury houses and their show sets, with Chanel creating supermarkets and airports for its shows and all that…Is it a highly competitive field?  

Yes, it is competitive. It’s quite weird when you think of how many important designers, stylists, hair and makeup artists, or whatever there are and there’s only a handful in any city who do the show productions…which is very little compared to the number of shows being put on.

I can’t imagine the stress of the live aspect of these shows. Have you had any disasters?

Yes and no, there have been disasters, but never anything unsolvable…One disaster happened during a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. There were PETA people with banners running behind Gisele who’s walking down the runway half naked. Well because of that we had to stop the show, which was entirely computerized, and go back into the previous loop. It was the first time ever we were using this software to computerize flights so that we could make Angels fly at crazy speeds, and stopping the show and rebooting the flight programming - something we had never tested - was a very, very scary moment. We also had a guitar player harnessed 90 feet above the ground who had to be re-booted, so there he was stuck up there. I’ve had a few crazy things happen…I once had a tank of jellyfish crack during a presentation for Giambattista Valli for Moncler Gamme Rouge a few years ago. We had this jellyfish protection society from the South of France on our backs after that.

Never work with children or animals, right?

Not all, we did horses with Jacquemus last week! I think it’s fun, whether it’s animals or chemicals. I did a show for Rodarte a few years a go where people entered the space in the dark, and it was filled with this heavy low smoke, with soft music playing. Some of them fell asleep, when we brought the lights up you saw all these people in the front row with their eyes closed [laughs]. And again, we were doing this in the dark, you can only do it once and you will only discover whether it worked or not at the same time everyone else does - when the lights go up. You have to take chances in life and take chances when you do a fashion show, obviously.

What would you have been if you weren’t doing this?

A ceramist? A chef? An architect?

You have an obsession with space. Do you hope to do a show on the moon one day?

Yes I do, but until I reach the moon, space will do in the meantime.

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