These immersive, storytelling spaces set mood and shift energy, creating a world the collection can live within. Sometimes, they make the audience part of the story too.

Across New York, London, Milan and Paris, four themes emerged.

THE PLACE TO BE

Usually, fashion shows ask little of their audience: sit down and observe. This season, however, the best spaces asked a little more of their guests.

Diesel’s final show with Glenn Martens turned an industrial site in Milan into a packed, sweaty club, bathed in red light. The purpose-built space was created by Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, with 200 performers from Marseille collective LA HORDE threaded through the crowd. One moment, hundreds of people began French kissing in unison. The next, they were thrashing their heads back and forth.

The room had the loose, electric feeling of a night out that had got slightly out of hand. In a quintessentially Diesel way. The club was designed around the idea of an anatomical theatre, but there was no neat divide between the runway, the performers and the people watching. Everyone was in it together, whether they liked it or not.

Loewe took a very different route, but landed on a similar feeling. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez asked Casper Mueller Kneer Architects to create a space somewhere between an arena, theatre and gallery. The result was a ghostly, two-storey amphitheatre inside a temporary white box in the courtyard of Château de Vincennes.

Angular benches zigzagged across the ground floor, while an upper gallery wrapped around the room. The models moved through the gaps, often less than an arm’s length from the audience. The architects spoke about “intensity and proximity”: the pleasure of being in the middle of something, with nowhere to hide.

Valentino took this idea somewhere more literal. For Alessandro Michele’s show at Paris’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, every guest was asked to bring a book. On arrival, those books were collected in a glass donation box, ready to be given to local libraries after the show. Cynthia Erivo brought James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Colman Domingo arrived with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Michele called the show Antibiblioteca, after Umberto Eco’s idea of the anti-library: the books you own but have not yet read, and the possibility contained within them. The collection took place among the long oak tables, green lamps and iron arches of the 19th-century reading room. But it was the small act of arriving with something to give away that made the space feel special, with each visitor contributing to the whole vision.

FANTASY MADE REAL

Some of the sharpest spaces this season played with the things we already know: shops, roads and grand Parisian courtyards. But explored them through an unfamiliar lens.

For Gucci’s “Store Show”, Demna turned a convention centre into a future Gucci flagship. There were velvet banquettes, dove-grey carpets, stone friezes, marble surfaces and display cases stocked with old Gucci pieces, as if the shop had opened specially for Fashion Week.

Created with his longtime collaborator Niklas Bildstein Zaar, the space previewed Gucci’s new retail concept, except it was not quite a shop. Look upwards and visitors could see the rigging overhead. Fake street scenes sat beyond the windows. The set was uncanny, like a dream of a shop where everything looks almost perfect, but is slightly off.

At Louis Vuitton, Nicolas Ghesquière and production designer James Chinlund brought the future to the Cour Carrée of the Louvre. Thirty-four flying cars hovered above a runway made to look like a city road, complete with traffic barriers, lane markings and glowing red tail lights. The cars were painted in red, silver and the Louis Vuitton Damier pattern.

It was a vision of the future that stripped the city back to its essentials. Familiar forms were smoothed into graphic objects, floating rather than moving through traffic. Against the historic walls of the Louvre, the scene felt clean and surreal.

THE QUIET ONES

Not every great show space needed a giant set piece. Some of the strongest moments came from one idea, communicated with exactitude.

At Calvin Klein, curator Antwaun Sargent placed Walter De Maria’s polished steel sculptures inside New York’s Terminal Warehouse. The works sat among the warehouse’s brick walls and industrial structure, catching the light and reflecting the movement of people around them.

Sargent selected the work in conversation with Veronica Leoni’s interest in American Minimalism, choosing sculptures defined by repetition, geometry and restraint. The result was calm and considered, allowing the sculptures, the building and the collection to sit in close conversation.

Bottega Veneta took a similarly considered approach in Milan. Guests sat on stools made from crushed cardboard boxes, each one created by Ukrainian-born artist Illya Goldman Gubin. He hugged and compressed the boxes by hand, then strengthened them with fibreglass and resin until they could hold a person.

The creases and dents were left in place. On every stool sat a small leather flower, made by Bottega Veneta’s artisans. The folded cardboard carried a subtle echo of the house’s craft techniques, an everyday material made tactile and precious.

Burberry found warmth in restraint. At Chelsea College of Arts, Daniel Lee created a bright, almost empty room with pale wooden seating, criss-crossed black lines and a single checked door. The furniture softened the otherwise spare space, while the pattern nodded to Burberry’s check without turning the room into a logo.

It was a useful reminder that a show space does not need to compete with the collection. Sometimes a light touch gives everything else room to breathe.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Fashion week has always been good at taking people elsewhere. This season, a few shows did it with unusual lightness.

At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy filled the Grand Palais with 95 illuminated birds, suspended above a vast coloured-resin floor. The birds were made from wooden frames wrapped in semi-translucent tracing paper and inspired by the migratory species Blazy watches near his home in Calabria.

Below them, the poured floor was painted in loose orange, green and sandy tones, based on an aerial view of a bird sanctuary near Blazy’s home. It reflected the birds overhead and continued an approach he has returned to across his Chanel shows: using the floor to place the collection in a complete visual world.

Givenchy created another kind of escape inside a purpose-built box at Les Invalides. Sarah Burton worked with production designer James Chinlund on a world of suspended wooden forms, graphic cut-outs and swathes of white and Klein-blue fabric draped from metal frames.

Inspired by Alexander Calder’s mobiles, the space played with balance, negative space and movement. Models moved through openings in the set, appearing and disappearing between the forms.

Saint Laurent went somewhere darker. Anthony Vaccarello turned the Trocadéro into an open-air ballroom, framed by three monumental chandeliers created with Bureau Betak. Their gold light fell onto a glossy black runway, with the Eiffel Tower behind them.

The chandeliers referenced the ballroom of the Hôtel InterContinental, where Yves Saint Laurent once presented couture collections. Vaccarello translated its grandeur into an outdoor setting, using scale, reflection and light to create a cinematic vision of Paris after dark.

MORE THAN A BACKDROP

Whether it was a packed club, a floating traffic jam or a library built through participation, this season’s strongest show spaces did more than give the clothes somewhere to walk. They brought guests closer to the action, found fantasy in the familiar and showed how emotion can be expressed through one well-executed idea.

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