Simon Costin’s Impossible Catwalk Shows

This exhibition featured newly commissioned work by set designer Simon Costin, renowned for his work with Tim Walker and Alexander McQueen, and questioned what catwalk shows could be if the possibilities were limitless.

In a series of model sets, Costin chose a myriad of real and imagined spaces to stage his fantastical and innovative presentation ideas: from a disused nuclear power station to a cardboard forest. Each fictitious show challenges current formalised ways of viewing garments: from searching for them amongst the branches of a baroque forest to seeing deconstructed parts of a garment through giant lenses.

Costin says: ‘What I want to present here is a series of suggestions as to how fashion presentations could be; an invitation to dream and speculate. A collection shown as graffiti strewn across a deserted street; a collection displayed in a forest, where guests are handed binoculars and invited to spot the models, perched like exotic birds among the branches; or a deserted nuclear power station, the interior encrusted with crystals, with a collection that slowly decays.’

Accompanying the model sets were Costin’s sketches and notebooks, which gave an insight into his own working process.

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