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"The Best Fashion Show Sets from Chanel, Louis Vuitton and More\nWhile clothing is the focus of any fashion week, inspiring, over-the-top sets often vie for attention. Here's a roundup of the most creative catwalks from recent seasons\nAt Chanel's fall 2012 show, imposing shards of what resembled amethyst and smoky quartz looked as if they erupted from the grounds of the Palais Royal, while smaller crystals and sparkling sand crunched underfoot. All was meant to reinforce the collection's metallic leitmotif, along with the mineral-shaped geometric prints and rough-cut jewelry\u2014the models' eyebrows were even sprinkled with tiny stones. Lagerfeld's elemental idea? Nature is the best designer.\nIt's well known in fashion that Monsieur Dior had a deep love for botanicals (you can visit his childhood home, villa Les Rhumbs, in Granville, France, and see where he plotted alongside his mother). After creating his groundbreaking New Look collection in 1947, he said, \"I have designed flower women.\" Over a half-century later, the Antwerp-based florist Mark Colle, inspired by Les Rhumbs' gardens, covered the walls of five rooms in a Parisian mansion with blossoms for the fall 2012 Dior couture show, which was the debut of the house's new creative director Raf Simons. Seen here are a mix of yellow and pink zinnias, roses, and dahlias; another room was wall-to-wall blue delphiniums; one was completely goldenrod; and yet another, white orchids.\nA locomotive\u2014a real one, built just for the occasion, blowing steam and all\u2014pulled into the Cour Carr\u00E9e of the Louvre for Louis Vuitton's fall 2012 show. Navy blue with the maison's name in signature gold lettering on its side, the train transported models who were met by porters carrying their bags (LV began as a trunk company, after all). They, and the collection, were meant to evoke romantic notions of the bygone glamour of travel. \"The time that it recalls was filled with cinema, literature, thoughts of a better life,\" creative director Marc Jacobs explained. The company's fall print ads feature a re-creation of the train's interior.\nRalph Lauren marked the 40th anniversary of his label with a triumphant show and bash at New York City's Central Park Conservatory Garden. The theme: a Royal Ascot-like scene reminiscent of the famously stylish one in the classic musical My Fair Lady. The painted backdrop of a horse race and its elegantly attired spectators included a black arched lattice, and black-and-white piped cushions for the audience were the perfect complements.\nFor his fall 2012 show, Marc Jacobs found a set designer in a close friend, the artist Rachel Feinstein. Jacobs had been admiring portraits of her by her husband, the painter John Currin, as well as her sculpture Puritan's Delight (a spooky, warped, horseless carriage), which led to Jacobs thinking, partly, of pilgrims when making the collection. So Feinstein, in turn, set her sights on crumbling ruins, dark grottoes, leafless trees. In two weeks she came up with her design, which was implemented by Jacobs's go-to set man Stefan Beckman and a team of carpenters who built the surreal backdrop out of paper and wood.\nFraming Oscar de la Renta's spring 2009 collection of elegant gowns, color-blocked swimwear, and signature suits was a trompe l'oeil building fa\u00E7ade. The set was partly inspired by the Branch Bank of the United States' (1822\u201324) stately Greek Revival limestone exterior (the work of National Academy of Design founder Martin E. Thompson, the building originally stood on Wall Street and its fa\u00E7ade is now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's court). The architectural backdrop was lightly sketched out\u2014on stretched muslin\u2014by set designer Stefan Beckman and his team, helping, as Beckman explains, to \"ground the clothes and evoke another time in New York.\"\nViewers at Alexander McQueen's fall 2006 show were astonished when, at the end of the presentation, what appeared to be a cloud of smoke within a glass pyramid unfurled into a hologram of Kate Moss. The work of director Baillie Walsh, the 3-D image of the supermodel dancing in a billowing dress lasted for a few scarce but breathtaking moments, before growing smaller and eventually disappearing. The late designer spared nothing when it came to theatrical sets (recall fall 2007's pentagram-marked stage and grim film footage, and an ark's worth of taxidermied animals for spring 2009, in both his line and its presentation).\nLongtime Prada collaborator OMA/AMO, Rem Koolhaas's firm, laid out 600 individual sky-blue foam cube seats at the label's spring 2012 men's show in Milan. Each was equidistant from the other, and models strolled through the audience\u2014meaning there was no front row. Emerald-green astroturf blanketed the floor. This was a collection heavily influenced by golf, after all.\nWhat was under that huge box on Chanel's runway? The chill that fashion editors felt when entering Paris's Palais Royal for the house's fall 2012 collection must have given at least a hint. As the show began, the box rose to reveal a 28-foot, 265-ton iceberg, brought over from Sweden just for the spectacle. Carved over six days by a team of 35 sculptors from around the globe (some of whom were also responsible for Sweden's Ice Hotel), it was creative director Karl Lagerfeld's commentary on global warming\u2014as the show progressed, models in fur (albeit faux) walked through the melting 'berg's puddles.\nFor Herm\u00E8s's fall 2009 collection, Jean Paul Gaultier paid homage to female pilots, sending his chic versions of fly girls down the runway in luxe fur-collared bombers, leather leggings, and jumpsuits. Looming behind them as they emerged onstage through fog to the sounds of Casablanca and other classic films from the 1940s: dark scaffolding rigged with plane propellers and big lights, which, when you squinted, gave the impression of aircrafts flying toward the crowd through the industrial Paris warehouse venue.\nMichael Howells, the British designer of both film and fashion sets, has created many a dramatic tableau for Dior, including the house's fall 2010 couture show featuring his giant yet incredibly lifelike flame-hued parrot tulips. The motif, fitting for a flower-inspired season, derived from both the collection's silhouettes\u2014there were tulip skirts, bien sur\u2014and the designer's admiration of famed florist Constance Spry, who made arrangements for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding and Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.\nParis-meets-Tokyo was the theme of Kim Jones's (under the direction of Marc Jacobs) fall 2012 show for Louis Vuitton, but from an unexpected perspective. The City of Light has long influenced global fashion, but Jones began wondering about Japan's influence on France\u2014\"the cross-fertilization that has occurred from the 19th century onwards,\" he explained\u2014through the lens of American fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez's 1970s and '80s works. How to get the point across on stage? Besides looks with hints of Japonisme, there was a giant Anish Kapoor-esque silver globe suspended above the runway entrance with the two cities' names in big letters, as well as those of places like Moscow, New Delhi, and Shanghai.\nKarl Lagerfeld's spring 2012 outing for Chanel couture took off \"aboard\" a specially crafted anodized-aluminum spacecraft\u2014complete with futuristic flight seats for 250 viewers, a double-C monogrammed carpet, and even a drinks cart serving preflight champagne. Models walked the wide aisle in all-blue looks (154 different shades of it). And at the end, the craft's pilot, Lagerfeld, emerged from the cockpit."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/fashion-show-set-design-chanel-louis-vuitton-marc-jacobs-slideshow>