A fashion show or a live performance may last only a few minutes, but what happens in the room during that brief window is often difficult to capture, measure, or replay. For Dutch spatial designer Dennis Vanderbroeck, this temporary collectiveness sits precisely at the core of his interdisciplinary practice. Moving fluidly between fashion, theater, music, and performance, Vanderbroeck approaches architecture not as a static arrangement of walls and structural elements, but as a dynamic framework for human encounter—one where the evolving relationship between performers and audiences matters just as much as the physical space itself.
With a foundational background in theater, Vanderbroeck focuses acutely on the emotional and psychological atmosphere a setting creates. His designs carefully orchestrate the scene for encounters between those on stage and those watching from the sidelines, intentionally leaving room for the unpredictable variables of live events. "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 presentation cycles at Milan and Paris fashion weeks, where the designer developed two entirely distinct approaches to staging fashion. From a scaffolded runway emphasizing raw collective energy for Diesel to a modular arrangement that suggested ongoing movement and change for Miu Miu, Vanderbroeck’s work continues to challenge traditional notions of how fashion is consumed live.
The Space Between the Collective and the Individual
Vanderbroeck’s recent high-profile collaborations with Diesel and Miu Miu reveal two contrasting yet complementary ways of exploring the complex relationship between a group and the individual. His ongoing work with creative director Glenn Martens at Diesel evolved across multiple seasons, driven by a shared interest in making contemporary fashion shows more inclusive, approachable, and socially charged.
Their final major collaboration for the brand brought these conceptual threads together through a rigid industrial scaffolding structure and a highly performative setting shaped by community, presence, and spatial disruption. Within this setup, the contrast between the crowd and the individual performer became central to the overall experience. While audience members occupied different levels of the massive scaffolding structure, live performers continually interrupted the scene, and models moved dynamically through the sprawling architecture.
In contrast, for the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2027 show staged at the historic Palais d’Iéna in Paris, Vanderbroeck approached the traditional runway through a completely different kind of spatial proximity. Working with the luxury brand for the first time, the designer and his team developed an interior layout featuring tightly arranged bleachers and an unusually narrow catwalk. This intimate arrangement consciously recalled the close-up energy of 1990s runway shows, placing the audience into close physical contact while models passed directly in front of them.
Although these two projects grew out of entirely different creative conversations, both deeply explored the delicate friction between the collective body and the singular spectator. "In our fashion work, we always try to do something with this idea of the collective versus the singular, the individual," Vanderbroeck highlights. "That friction is forever interesting to me." At any major fashion show, all eyes naturally gravitate toward the garments coming down the runway, yet the actual memory of the event is powerfully shaped by the crowd sitting shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter. Vanderbroeck plays with this subtle psychological dynamic through precise spatial layouts, pulling the audience into the heart of the experience without ever dictating how they should react or feel.
Designing Movement Within a Static Space
The idea of creating a space that actively anticipates its next use also heavily informed Vanderbroeck’s maiden collaboration with Miu Miu. The runway show was intentionally developed in direct dialogue with Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), an upcoming exhibition by 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," the spatial designer explains. "So for the exhibition, the same venue will be repurposed almost, reframed, and recontextualized."
To achieve this, tracks laid directly across the stone floor supported modular bleachers, giving the runway a subtle sense of kinetic potential even while the physical structure remained completely still. The layout anticipated the art exhibition that would immediately follow, ensuring that elements of the fashion show were purposefully designed to be reconfigured and endowed with entirely new meanings in a different context.
Vanderbroeck describes this methodology as building a dynamic stage. Drawing heavily on his extensive background in theatrical design, he treats a set not as a finished, static backdrop, but as an adaptable apparatus capable of accommodating multiple shifting situations over time. The design becomes part of a longer, continuous sequence, shaped just as much by what comes next as by the immediate event unfolding in the room.
From the Theater to the Live Stage
Theater remains a vital and enduring reference point in Vanderbroeck’s practice, even when he applies his spatial methodology to radically different forms of live performance. For Issey Miyake’s OPEN STUDIO presentation at London’s Tate Modern, he drew inspiration from the circular geometry of the museum’s raw concrete oil tanks to explore themes of intimacy and the metaphor of an embrace. He utilized the heavy architecture to shape varying degrees of spatial proximity between the performers and the surrounding audience members, guiding the experience smoothly from a sweeping, collective sense of embrace down to intimate, one-to-one interactions between an individual performer and a watcher.
Vanderbroeck also carefully considered the visitor’s journey through the museum, moving from Henri Matisse’s renowned cut-out The Snail into the vast expanse of the Turbine Hall and finally down into the South Tank. The resulting installation formed part of a wider sequence of spatial encounters, where the existing architecture and historical artworks directly informed the modern concept.
This deep-seated interest in how physical settings shape live musical experiences extends seamlessly into the pop music sphere. For the Lux Tour, Vanderbroeck collaborated closely with Rosalía and her creative team, successfully synthesizing references drawn from high fashion, popular culture, theater, and fine art. He describes the ambitious undertaking as a comprehensive 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," Vanderbroeck notes.
Beyond the Image
In our contemporary digital era—where live events are instantly documented, heavily photographed, and rapidly circulated across social media platforms—Dennis Vanderbroeck remains steadfastly focused on what it actually means to experience an event in person. While he fully acknowledges that photographic images matter immensely, particularly within the fast-paced world of fashion, he never begins a design project by simply imagining how it will look framed on a mobile 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 philosophy directly carried over into the set design for Rosalía’s tour, where camera directions were choreographed to follow the organic energy of the live performance rather than dictating it. For Vanderbroeck, capturing an event on film is simply a tool for how it is later remembered, but it can never truly substitute for the irreplaceable sensory experience of being physically present in the room.
The Dutch spatial designer also understands the widespread modern impulse to photograph an experience as a subconscious way of securing a memory. Pulling out a smartphone often functions as a method to confirm one’s physical presence, to hold tightly onto a fleeting moment that would otherwise vanish into thin air. Yet, a photograph remains fundamentally separate from the live event itself, which relies entirely on a unique arrangement of living bodies, spontaneous movement, and shared time.
That inherent unpredictability is ultimately what draws Vanderbroeck back to the theater time and time again. Having recently designed the set for a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull, he recalls the first preview performance in front of a live audience as a stark reminder that despite months of meticulous preparation, human reaction remains completely impossible to forecast. "You never can predict how an audience is going to respond," he observes. For the designer, that initial, unfiltered encounter between a creative work and its audience underscores the ultimate boundary of design: an artist can carefully shape the physical setting and the environmental conditions, but once the doors open and the people step inside, what happens next belongs entirely to the room.
