The City Mirrored

Project:
The City Mirrored

Location:
New York, USA

Manufacturers:
Mountain Productions

Project Submitted By:
Mountain Productions

Yves Saint Laurent, the luxury French fashion brand, chose the perfect setting for their 2019 Spring Summer Men’s Fashion Show.

Under the direction of Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello, a bold look was established featuring towering scaffolding and an endless black marble performance area framed by the skyline of lower Manhattan. Bureau Betak, the renowned fashion design creative agency, came to Mountain Productions to provide our expertise and to engineer, fabricate, and assemble the bespoke structure connecting 69 YSL models, VIP attendees and even reaching beyond the venue to the wider world via live streaming.

In working with Bureau Betak, Mountain has to achieve this project with custom specifications on a very large scale including custom wire handrail, high sheen scaffolding, bespoke risers, stairs, and finishes on a structure that was over 15,000 square ft.

Bureau Betak is a special events company dedicated to the industries of fashion, beauty and art. Founded 20 years ago by creative director and producer Alexandre de Betak, the studio specializes in fashion shows, events and exhibitions and operates worldwide, with offices in Paris, New York and Shanghai.

Their global team is comprised of designers, producers and technical artists, whose first mission is to translate Betak’s visionary and avant-garde ideas into the runway universe.

The Mountain Productions team had to draw on its extensive functions and expertise to ensure this once-off unique interactive performance area and vision could be realised. The Mountain Productions engineering and design team Created a VR model with a Lidar scanner for accurate dimensions of liberty state park. The lifelike model helped the client make decisions on placement and design to scale in a virtual environment.

Engineering: Worked with designers to achieve their “look” within the budget of the project and local building codes, standards and regulations.

Carpentry Shop: Fabricated all the custom wood decking for the project including stair tread covers, and custom VIP Riser seating

Welding Shop: Fabricated the custom keder extrusions for the softgoods to attach to the structure.

Tool and Rigging: Fabricated the wire rope cable bracing for the structure.

Softgoods Shop: Fabricated the clear vinyl over the VIP seating riser, media area, and FOH control booth

Our team of engineers spent more than two hundred hours of engineering on the structure, with a main performance area spanning 72 feet wide, 14 feet tall and 304 feet long, working closely with the Bureau Betak visionaries.

24 Mountain trailers of scaffolding and 9 other Mountain trailers of decking, ballast and support made the journey to the edge of the Hudson River, transforming a remote location into a premier venue.

A custom truss canopy framed the 69 YSL models and stood 282 feet wide and a 60 feet tall. 6,000 square feet of clear vinyl for the truss canopy were manufactured at Mountain Productions campus for adequate weather protection.

With the likes of David Franco, Lauryn Hill, Travis Scott, and Kate Moss in attendance, Mountain’s custom Seating Risers, Flooring and Stairs needed to be fit for the stars and fashionistas utilizing them.

This spectacular show took place on a specially built stage with a huge scaffolding structure and a black marble runway – true to the YSL aesthetic & an installation demands. As the night fell, the  sparkling Manhattan skyline lit up in the background, merging  Saint Laurent, and New York, at its finest.

The close proximity of the front row to the black marble runway gave the audience a unique immersive experience basking in the full magnificence of the New York  night skyline.
The show was a major event to kick off the season and was simulcast in Times Square and on Yves Saint Laurent’s digital platforms. Even if you did not make the VIP guest list you could still interact with this visual experience & enjoy this one-off event via a digital live stream of the show thanks to an on-hand live stream.

“The Mountain Productions team was excited to collaborate with Bureau Betak, using new production tech including VR, to deliver a bespoke and bold structure fit for luxury fashion,” says CEO, Ricky Rose.