Though the Spring-Summer 2020 menswear fashion parade doesn’t officially kick off until June 8 in London, Alexander Wang set the tone for the season on Friday night. At Rockefeller Center—never before home to a fashion show—Wang showed a collection inspired by the New York designers who paved the way for his late-aughts rise. A massive LED stage served as the runway, set up in front of the gold Prometheus statue. About the size of the Rock Center ice rink, the stage is a hallmark of creative director Willo Perron, who designed the show. It was reminiscent of the one that Perron made for Drake’s last tour, the one with the flying Ferrari—and it was the spectacle, shifting from a pulsing white field to an American flag blowing in the wind, which provided the backdrop for the perfect Instagram after the show. And since it was held at the beating heart of Manhattan’s tourist district on a Friday night, the public ringed the granite space hooting and waving when Pete Davidson (yes) and Kaia Gerber took their turns strutting through the space.
According to Perron, the show is a preview of the scale, ambition, and access he would like to bring to the fashion circuit. Perron isn’t the type to embrace the spotlight, but with his design firm, Willo Perron & Associates, he has quietly creative-directed some of the most iconic events in recent pop cultural history: Rihanna’s ANTI tour, Kanye West’s SNL 40 performance, Drake’s tour. Ever been to a Stüssy store? Perron designed those, too, as well as Kanye’s Yeezy studio in Calabasas. He even won a Grammy for the package design he did for St. Vincent’s Masseduction album. That’s being a modern creative director, in a nutshell: Perron is basically able to project his extremely dialed-in taste on any medium of any scale, whether it’s an art book or a blockbuster world tour.
In a cab on his way to put the finishing touches on his first fashion show, he discussed how the format stays relevant at a time when fashion labels are grappling with its cost, whether the schedule makes sense, and what to do about social media.
GQ: I've been thinking about how fashion shows used to just be Diana Vreeland and some buyers looking at fashion. It was very private and intimate. And now, basically everything has changed about the ways that designers present clothing, but there are still models walking down a runway, wearing clothes. Do you think that’s still the best way for people to view fashion?
Willo Perron: For the most part you'll only really see clothes—how it fits and how it looks and how it drapes and how it moves and everything else—on the person. Especially as you go more and more online, you still need the physical representation, which is gonna be on models. That is the one part that you can't really do away with. And I think [fashion shows] have been very kind of elitist, it's been kind of for this very small group of people for a really long time. And in the near present I've invited the public into the equation. I can only see it kind of going more and more that way. The grandiosity of things like the Chanel show and how badly people want to go to something like that ... it seems weird to not eventually have it be a paid event or almost like a concert, a festival.
And tonight there'll be public engagement because it’s in Rockefeller Center. Why’d you want to hold the show there? Can you walk me through the steps of putting tonight's event together?
Well the whole show is an homage to New York and the New York designers of the past and that energy and kind of really embracing the space and the city. And so there were a bunch of ideas flung around for the sheer iconography of them. Rockefeller Center was just one that worked on all fronts, in terms of both having a space for editors and guests, and also something that the public can engage with. And the iconography of that Prometheus statue that's been in every New York City movie... How do we kind of readopt these things that are very much the fabric of the city?
What gets you excited about creative directing an event that, once the clothes start coming out, will be over in less than 10 minutes?
You know, all formats are a different challenge. Like going from TV to live shows to intimate live shows to stadium-size live shows. They all serve a different purpose and need to be approached in a different way. We haven't done a lot of fashion shows, but I think that it definitely needs a little bit of a jolt as a whole. That was the impetus for me to start doing live shows at the beginning: I felt like rock and roll didn’t feel like architecture or like proper design, to me. It just felt like lighting directors or choreographers had taken over to the point where the people designing shows were not designers. And I think that the fashion industry feels like it definitely needs a little outsider jolt, which we can hopefully provide.
What exactly about the fashion shows you’ve been seeing needs an update? Do you mean that the white walls needed to be broken down further?
I think that the ones that have been eventized and made into kind of a bigger thing have had a lot of success. There's a lot of different ways to approach this. I think that it's probably a huge conversation. But it feels a little bit the same to me. It's still exciting. It's still a thing. But you're starting to see people go off calendar, you're starting to see the beginning of the thing breaking apart a little bit, and that will make way for something new and exciting, hopefully.
When you're approaching, creative directing an event, to what extent are you thinking about social media and the way that the event will be disseminated on Instagram? Sometimes I go to an art show or a performance, and I'll be like, oh wow, this was built for Instagram. And that makes me feel weird. How do you balance that with the reality that any event these days basically needs to be shared online?
I see this a lot in concerts where people build one big piece of architecture that's like a really great Instagram photo, but the concert itself isn't that interesting. There's no real flow to the concert, there's no real heart beating through the thing, but you have a great iconic photo. So yeah, obviously the balance is how do you get a piece of iconography and also have any fan and person have a great, enjoyable, emotional sort of transcendent evening that doesn’t rely solely on capturing this kind of Instagram moment. I don't think for artistic integrity you can avoid how people consume information now. It's real. It's just there. It exists. So it's important to be clear. Okay, you know, we'll give you enough of that. But we also want the thing to have a heart.
