Artifice × Heavensgate
NYFW showcase · September 2024
A fashion and art night for NYFW that we put on with Artifice NYC, with a runway, a short film and live VJ sets.
- Role
- Executive producer, creative director, production director
- For
- Heavensgate × Artifice NYC
- Crowd
- Around 300–400 people, I believe
What it was
After the 2023 Heavensgate show went well, we made the next one bigger and teamed up with Artifice NYC, a company known for large-scale projection and media art installations.
I coordinated pretty much everything: negotiating with the venue and vendors, running rehearsals, scheduling, and the technical production. On the night, my job was making sure the fashion, the performers and the live visuals actually fit together, and keeping the DJs, performers and creative leads talking to each other.
The challenge
Every act had complicated tech, and we wanted as little dead time between segments as possible. That included live VJs running Unreal Engine off things like joysticks and steering wheels.
How the night ran
- Guests came in to an opening DJ set.
- As the crowd built, models came out of the audience and formed a runway in the room.
- Five designers showed their collections, starting with an experimental dance performance.
- Right after the runway, we projected a short film of selected Artifice works onto a cyclorama.
- The film went straight into a live set from a DJ and real-time Unreal Engine VJs.
- For the second performance we wheeled a big table into the middle of the crowd and hooked all the VJ gear up to it.
- A final DJ set kept it going to the end of the night.
On the day
I was also walking the models through the catwalk, which came out of the center of the room like the year before. This time, instead of LED strips on the floor, we used barn-door lights from above, which put a heavenly glow on the models. One designer had their models open the runway with a semi-acrobatic dance that turned into a regular walk, and we taped it out on the floor beforehand.
How it went
Wheeling that table into the crowd ended up being one of the best moments of the night. It felt spontaneous and a little dreamlike. Watching the crowd open up on its own so the models could walk was really wonderful, too. It was an attentive group, and we barely had to do any crowd management, even during the quick changeovers.
