A fashion show or a live performance may last only a few minutes, but what happens within the room is often much harder to capture or define. For Dutch spatial designer Dennis Vanderbroeck, this temporary collectiveness sits squarely at the heart of his diverse practice, which moves fluidly between fashion, theater, music, and performance art. Rather than treating architecture as a static container, Vanderbroeck approaches space as an active framework for encounter, where the evolving relationship between performers and audiences matters just as much as the physical enclosure itself.
With a rich background rooted in theater, Vanderbroeck focuses intently on the emotional and psychological experience that a carefully crafted setting creates. His designs establish the physical scene for spontaneous encounters, leaving ample room for the unexpected to unfold in real time.
"I always say that our designs are just a tool to facilitate the experience," Vanderbroeck tells designboom. "It’s more about the experience of the moment than the space itself."
This philosophy was vividly demonstrated during recent fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, where the designer developed two distinct, highly anticipated approaches to staging fashion. From a scaffolded runway that emphasized collective, raw energy for Diesel to a modular arrangement that suggested ongoing movement and change for Miu Miu, Vanderbroeck continues to redefine the boundaries of runway architecture.
The Space Between the Collective and the Individual
Dennis Vanderbroeck’s recent collaborations with Diesel and Miu Miu reveal two completely different ways of exploring the complex relationship between the individual spectator and the collective crowd. His work alongside creative director Glenn Martens at Diesel evolved over the course of several seasons, driven by a shared, underlying interest in making contemporary fashion more inclusive, approachable, and socially charged. Their final collaboration for the brand brought these visionary ideas together through a rigid, industrial scaffolding structure and a highly performative setting shaped by community, physical presence, and theatrical disruption.
In this environment, the striking contrast between the group and the individual quickly became central to the overall audience experience. While large groups of people occupied the vast scaffolding structure, live performers routinely interrupted the scene, and models navigated the complex pathways of the room.
For the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2027 show at the historic Palais d’Iéna in Paris, Vanderbroeck approached the runway through an entirely different kind of spatial proximity. Working with the prestigious luxury brand for the first time, the designer and his dedicated team developed an interior layout characterized by tightly arranged bleachers and an unusually narrow catwalk. This intimate configuration deliberately recalled the raw, unvarnished proximity of 1990s runway shows. The audience sat remarkably close together, creating a sense of shared enclosure, while the models passed directly and uncomfortably close in front of them.
Although these two high-profile projects grew out of distinct creative conversations, both deeply explored the ongoing tension between the individual and the group.
"In our fashion work, we always try to do something with this idea of the collective versus the singular, the individual," he highlights. "That friction is forever interesting to me."
At any standard fashion show, all eyes are ostensibly fixed on the garments coming down the runway, but the lived reality of the experience is profoundly shaped by the crowd of observers surrounding each guest. Vanderbroeck deliberately plays with this volatile dynamic through the precise layout of the space, successfully bringing the audience into the fabric of the performance without ever prescribing how they should feel or react.
Designing Movement Within a Static Space
The idea of a physical space that actively anticipates its next use also shaped Vanderbroeck’s debut collaboration with Miu Miu. The runway show was meticulously developed in close relation to Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), an upcoming exhibition by acclaimed French filmmaker Alice Diop presented as part of the Art Basel Paris Public Program.
"We wanted to create a space that suggests movement and that suggests transition. So for the exhibition, the same venue will be repurposed almost, reframed, and recontextualized," the spatial designer explains.
Innovative tracks laid directly across the stone floor supported modular bleachers, giving the temporary runway a powerful sense of physical movement even though the underlying architectural structure remained entirely still. The clever arrangement cleverly anticipated the multidisciplinary exhibition that would immediately follow, ensuring that elements of the fashion show were purposefully intended to be reconfigured and endowed with entirely different meanings within a new context.
Vanderbroeck describes this sophisticated approach as constructing a dynamic stage. Drawing heavily on his formative background in theater, he treats a set not as a finished, static backdrop, but as a flexible organism capable of accommodating drastically different situations over time. The design ultimately becomes part of a much longer narrative sequence, shaped just as much by what comes next as by the immediate event taking place in the room.
From the Theater to the Live Stage
Theater remains an enduring and essential reference point in Vanderbroeck’s professional practice, even when he is designing for entirely different forms of live performance. For Issey Miyake’s OPEN STUDIO presentation at the Tate Modern, he drew inspiration from the distinctive circular geometry of the museum’s brutalist concrete oil tanks to explore themes of intimacy and the metaphor of a human embrace. He skillfully used the geometry of the existing architecture to shape varying degrees of spatial proximity between the performers and the surrounding audience members. The resulting experience transitioned smoothly from a generalized, collective sense of embrace toward a much more intimate, one-to-one interaction unfolding between an individual performer and a single watcher.
Vanderbroeck also carefully considered the visitor’s journey through the museum as a whole, moving conceptually from Henri Matisse’s iconic cut-out The Snail through the cavernous expanse of the Turbine Hall and finally down into the South Tank. The resulting work formed an integral part of a wider sequence of spaces and cultural encounters, with the surrounding architecture and historical artworks directly informing the conceptual core.
This keen interest in how a physical setting shapes a live musical experience extends naturally into the realm of pop music. For the Lux Tour, Vanderbroeck collaborated closely with Rosalía and her creative team, successfully weaving together disparate visual references drawn from high fashion, popular culture, theater, and fine art. He looks back on the ambitious project as a true accumulation of his entire artistic practice.
"With Rosalía, honestly, it was an accumulation of my whole practice in one project, where fashion, music, but also popular culture and theater and the references through fine art all came together," Dennis Vanderbroeck comments.
Beyond the Image
In an era when major live events are increasingly documented, digitized, and instantly circulated across digital platforms, Dennis Vanderbroeck remains steadfastly focused on what it actually means to experience them in person. He readily acknowledges that captivating images matter deeply, particularly within the fast-paced world of fashion, but he never begins a design project by imagining how it will look reduced to a glowing phone screen.
"I’m always trying to intentionally design from the physical experience," he shares. "If it then resonates well online or resonates well on your phone or something, then perfect. But it’s never the main intention."
This thoughtful philosophy carried seamlessly into the set design for Rosalía’s Lux Tour, where the camera direction was choreographed to follow the organic energy of the live performance rather than dictating the staging. For Vanderbroeck, filming an event is simply part of how it is collectively remembered, but it can never truly replace the irreplaceable experience of being physically present in the room.
The Dutch spatial designer also recognizes the widespread modern impulse to photograph an ephemeral experience as a psychological way of securing a memory. Pulling out a smartphone can quickly become a mechanical means of confirming one’s own presence, of desperately holding on to a fleeting moment that would otherwise vanish into thin air. Yet, the resulting photograph remains fundamentally separate from the live event itself, which relies entirely on a precarious arrangement of real people, physical bodies, movement, and unscripted time.
That inherent uncertainty is precisely what continues to draw Vanderbroeck toward the world of theater. Having recently designed the set for Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull, he vividly recalls the nervous anticipation of the very first preview performance in front of a live audience as a stark reminder that, despite months of rigorous preparation, human response remains entirely impossible to predict.
"You never can predict how an audience is going to respond," he observes.
For the designer, that initial, fragile encounter between a creative work and its audience serves as a humbling reminder that design can only go so far. He can meticulously shape the physical setting and the optimal conditions for an experience to occur, but what happens once the doors open and real people enter the room ultimately remains beyond his control.
