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Bandit in Fashion
The first was for S2 Events and staged at the high profile British Fashion Council’s marquee, Duke of York’s Barracks in London’s Kings Road. The second was in Selfridges’ Car Park for the Fashion Fringe shows. Fashion Fringe is a new concept, launched to offer the best of UK’s young fashion designers a chance to showcase their talents and imaginations.
The main tent at the Duke of York’s Barracks seated approximately 500 people and saw 24 of the finest, funkiest and most prominent collections of next season revealed, including Jasper Conran (pictured). Simon Tutchener was the lighting designer, now in his eighth year and 16th season of lighting LFW events. Production manager was Tom Brunsdon for S2 Events, who has been involved in LFW for the last 23 years, and Bandit’s Lester Cobrin project managed the lighting elements for his 13th season running.
The lighting get-in started with the supply of a large A-type trussing grid – of which a large generic lighting rig was hung. Bandit also supplied a number of ‘specials’ for the assorted individual shows, each one of which wanted to make its own special statement and have its own distinctive stage presentation as well as catwalk look!
The grid was suspended on 10 points and measured 120 ft long by 32 ft wide and was injected with two 120’ LiteBeam trusses from which the majority of the lanterns were suspended directly above the catwalk. The fixture list was dominated by around 160 Source Fours Profiles and Pars. These were joined with a scattering of 2k and 5k Fresnels, single cell floods and PAR 64s . . . plus all the various additional specials which ranged from 5 ft mirror balls and Martin MAC 2ks to Lycian followspots. Dimming was via two 72-way Avo racks and the shows were run off WholeHog II console, programmed and operated by Tellson James.
Tutchener’s main challenge at fashion shows is always to create a clean, daylight white flat-field of light all along the catwalk. This enables the action to be captured on film and video without camera operators having to worry about differing exposures or dealing with the idiosyncrasies of high or low light contrast fluctuations. Effectively it’s creating a studio environment for a live show.
Beyond this, he also had to accommodate the various different designers’ ideas about how they wanted their individual shows to look and the special effects they had in mind. This meant a complete re-light each time, whilst still preserving the quality of the generic light. With three or four shows a day in the marquee, and only one or two hours between each one, the challenge was the turnaround. Here Tutchener worked closely with the Bandit crew to hone into a fine art – rigging was done by Kevin Morgan, with Matt Jensen on crew chief duties, Peter Parchment on dimmers and Mick Freer as lighting tech.
For the Fashion Fringe with lighting designed by Thierry Dreyfus and production by Inca Productions, Bandit supplied 202 Source Four Pars with barn doors for this show – a mixture of 10, 26, and 36 degrees, plus seven Molefays with colour changers. All fixtures were floor mounted because of the lack of ceiling height and rigging points in the Selfridges car park. Crew were Ian Lomas, Nigel Julian, Rob Starksfield and Paul Sadler.
29th September 2004
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