Balenciaga’s head-turning Fall-Winter 2024 Collection featured oversize coats and jeans as a top, but the clothes weren’t the only thing worth paying attention to.

For the label’s Paris Fashion Week show, designers created an immersive art installation mashing-up images inspired by nature with digital distortions. Screen displays on the runway, ceiling, and walls showed landscapes inspired by Iceland, Greenland, Montana, the Sahara Desert, and the Scottish Highlands that transformed by the end of the show into representations of the digital world.

Viktor Virgile/courtesy Cour

The concept was “good taste vs. bad taste,” according to COUR, the American design studio that worked on the visuals. Landscape scenes were tweaked with editing software shown on screen (trees being resized) and artificial intelligence (dynamic images of flowers constantly being regenerated). By the end, the screen displays became walls of images and video like an infinite Instagram feed before eventually turning into white static noise.

“Building photorealistic, 360-degree landscapes that are beautiful compositions unto themselves is just one part of the challenge; then we had to figure out how to translate these worlds onto flat, 2D-video walls with forced perspectives,” COUR cofounder Erik Anderson tells Fast Company. From there, they had to stitch everything together seamlessly, which was more complicated than it might look.

“From the photos and videos, it only looks like a hallway, but in actuality the space was four hallways that formed a complete circular loop for the models to walk,” he says.

If it looks like something you might see at a big-budget pop concert, that’s because COUR has primarily designed visuals for musicians, like Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, and LCD Soundsystem. The video animation for Usher’s Las Vegas residency? That was COUR, too.

Viktor Virgile/courtesy Cour

This was the studio’s first foray into the world of fashion, though, and unlike a concert where the audience shares a view of the stage over an extended period of time, they had to design an experience for an audience with multiple points of view that lasted just 15 minutes.

“This was a unique immersive environment where the audience was fixed in a variety of positions,” Anderson says. “Then, the show unfolded all around them, unlike a concert where the whole audience held a shared focal point.”

Working with the New York creative studio Good Company, the Berlin art studio Sub, and Balenciaga’s creative director Demna, the team created visuals they say covered a canvas larger than the Las Vegas Sphere. The Sphere is 16,000 pixels x 16,000 pixels. Their full raster for Balenciaga was 30,000 pixels by 30,000 pixels.

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