At the 2025 Paris Men’s Fashion Week, something unusual happened—fashion stepped aside, if only briefly, and let architecture speak.
Two of the biggest names in the industry, Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton, chose to stage their Spring/Summer 2026 collections in architectural landmarks rather than traditional venues. In doing so, they transformed their runway shows into immersive dialogues between material, space, and movement. The result? A fashion week that looked and felt like a slow-burn cinematic sequence—less spectacle, more soul.
One afternoon, if you happened to wander past the Bourse de Commerce in central Paris, you might have paused in confusion. The building—once a 19th-century commodities exchange, now renovated by Japanese architect Tadao Ando—stood solemn and still. Saint Laurent had taken over its raw concrete rotunda for their menswear show, and the space, bathed in soft afternoon light, was nothing short of reverent.
There was no pounding soundtrack, no flashbulbs popping. Instead, daylight streamed through oculi in the dome above, gently tracing shadows along the rotunda’s circular walls. At the center of the space, a shallow pool filled with floating porcelain bowls from artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s clinamen installation provided a barely audible, meditative chime. The entire setup evoked the hush of a temple more than the glitz of a runway.
“It felt sacred,” said Matthias, a curator from Berlin who attended the show. “I’ve never experienced a fashion event so spiritual—it was like an architecture performance wrapped in clothing.”
Anthony Vaccarello, Saint Laurent’s creative director, intentionally staged the show in the late afternoon, a notable departure from the usual evening presentations. “I want clothes to be seen in the same light we wear them in,” he said. His preference for natural illumination aligned perfectly with Ando’s architectural ethos—one that prioritizes material honesty and the poetry of light.
A few metro stops away, the vibe was entirely different—but no less compelling. Louis Vuitton chose the public plaza in front of the Centre Pompidou for their show, leaning into the bold chaos of the city’s most iconic postmodern structure. Designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in the 1970s, the Pompidou's “inside-out” façade—exposed pipes, colorful ducts, external escalators—provided a striking contrast to the handcrafted elegance of the runway design.
Here, Indian architect Bijoy Jain, founder of Studio Mumbai, collaborated with Louis Vuitton Men’s Creative Director Pharrell Williams to transform the plaza into a living, breathing game board—literally. Inspired by the ancient Indian game Snakes and Ladders, the set was hand-painted with a checkerboard of cosmic patterns and winding serpents rendered in white lime and burnt umber clay slip. It was playful, symbolic, and deeply rooted in Jain’s poetic material vocabulary.
“I felt like I had stepped into a painting I didn’t understand, but didn’t want to leave,” said Lena, an architecture student from Amsterdam. She wandered the space before the show began, tracing her fingers along the clay lines. “It reminded me of Gaudí’s Parc Güell, but flatter—and stranger. Beautifully strange.”
What stood out most was how the show turned a public, urban space into something sacred, reflective—even mythological. Jain’s intervention used traditional materials and manual techniques to recast the plaza as a symbolic map of life’s ups and downs. In this version of Snakes and Ladders, the “game” wasn’t a distraction but a meditation on growth, missteps, and transformation.
Together, the two shows demonstrated something that’s becoming increasingly true in fashion: the runway is no longer just a place to show clothes—it’s a platform for architectural and cultural storytelling.
Fashion and architecture have been converging more often in recent years. OMA, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, has designed multiple exhibitions for Dior, including the ethereal Miss Dior show in Tokyo and Designer of Dreams in Seoul. Meanwhile, Tadao Ando brought his architectural rigor to the 2023 Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty exhibition at the Met in New York. These aren’t just collaborations—they’re co-creations, where form meets fabric in deeply intentional ways.
Fashion, after all, is often called our “second skin.” Architecture, then, might be the third. It shapes how we move, how we feel, and—when done right—how we think.
Saint Laurent’s hushed rotunda and Louis Vuitton’s cosmic plaza offered two opposite yet equally powerful experiences. One invited stillness, the other curiosity. One whispered, the other sang. But both asked the same question: How does the space we wear meet the space we inhabit?
Next time you walk into a building, ask yourself this—what would you wear if it were your stage?