A fashion show or a live musical performance may last only a fleeting few minutes, but the collective energy generated within the room often lingers far longer, resisting simple capture or replication. For Dutch spatial designer Dennis Vanderbroeck, this temporary collectiveness sits squarely at the heart of his interdisciplinary practice. Moving fluidly between fashion, theater, music, and performance art, Vanderbroeck approaches architecture and set design not merely as passive backdrops, but as active frameworks for human encounter. To him, the dynamic relationship established between performers and audiences matters just as much as the physical space itself.
Rooted deeply in a professional background in theater, Vanderbroeck’s work focuses intensely on the emotional and psychological atmosphere that a specific setting creates. His spatial interventions establish the physical scene for unplanned encounters, deliberately leaving room for spontaneity and the unexpected. "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 iterations of Milan and Paris fashion weeks, where the designer conceptualized two radically different approaches to staging contemporary fashion: from a rugged, scaffolded runway emphasizing collective energy for Diesel to an intimate, modular arrangement suggesting continuous movement and change for Miu Miu.
The Space Between the Collective and the Individual
Vanderbroeck’s high-profile collaborations with Diesel and Miu Miu highlight two distinct methodologies for exploring the tension between group dynamics and individual presence. His ongoing creative dialogue with artistic director Glenn Martens at Diesel evolved across multiple seasons, driven by a mutual desire to make the world of high fashion more inclusive, approachable, and socially charged. Their final collaboration for the brand culminated in a rigid scaffolding structure combined with a highly performative setting built around community, raw presence, and intentional disruption.
Within this environment, the contrast between the crowd and the individual became a central pillar of the experience. While members of the audience occupied the expansive scaffolding framework, live performers periodically disrupted the visual field, and models navigated the complex pathways of the room.
For the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2027 show staged inside the historic Palais d’Iéna in Paris, Vanderbroeck approached the runway through an entirely different type of spatial proximity. Marking his inaugural collaboration with the luxury house, the designer and his studio team engineered an environment featuring tightly arranged bleachers alongside a remarkably narrow catwalk. This deliberate layout consciously evoked the intimate, unfiltered energy of 1990s runway presentations. Here, the audience sat in close physical proximity to one another, while models passed by mere inches away.
Although these two distinct projects stemmed from separate creative conversations, both ultimately interrogated the delicate friction linking the individual spectator to the collective body. "In our fashion work, we always try to do something with this idea of the collective versus the singular, the individual," Vanderbroeck explains, emphasizing the conceptual thread tying his projects together. "That friction is forever interesting to me." At any traditional fashion show, all eyes naturally gravitate toward the garments moving down the runway, yet the overall impression is invariably colored by the physical presence of the crowd surrounding the viewer. Vanderbroeck cleverly manipulates this dynamic through spatial choreography, integrating the audience directly into the narrative framework without prescribing how they ought to feel or react.
Designing Movement Within a Static Space
The concept of architecture anticipating its own future transformation also heavily influenced Vanderbroeck’s first major project for Miu Miu. The runway show was meticulously developed in dialogue with Geste de Consolation (Gesture of Consolation), an 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," the spatial designer notes. "So for the exhibition, the same venue will be repurposed almost, reframed, and recontextualized."
To achieve this fluid transition, steel tracks were laid directly across the floor to support modular bleachers, instilling the runway with a potent sense of kinetic energy even while the primary structures remained structurally still. The arrangement was intentionally engineered to anticipate the museum-scale exhibition that would immediately follow, ensuring that elements of the fashion show could be effortlessly reconfigured and reinterpreted within a completely new cultural context.
Vanderbroeck describes this methodology as the creation of a dynamic stage. Drawing heavily upon his foundational training in theater, he views a set not as a finished, static backdrop, but as a living apparatus capable of accommodating multiple shifting situations over time. The design thus transforms into part of an extended chronological sequence, shaped just as much by what will come next as by the immediate event unfolding inside the room.
From the Theater to the Live Stage
The traditions of theater continue to serve as a vital reference point in Vanderbroeck’s broader artistic practice, even when he is designing for entirely different forms of live performance. For Issey Miyake’s OPEN STUDIO presentation at London’s Tate Modern, he drew inspiration from the monumental circular geometry of the museum’s raw concrete tanks to investigate themes of human intimacy and the physical metaphor of an embrace. By utilizing the existing architectural curves, he successfully choreographed varying degrees of physical and psychological proximity between the performers and the surrounding audience members. The resulting experience transitioned fluidly from a broad, collective sense of communal embrace down to intimate, one-to-one visual interactions between a single performer and a spectator.
Furthermore, Vanderbroeck carefully considered the visitor’s journey through the museum itself, mapping the transition from Henri Matisse’s iconic cutout masterpiece The Snail into the cavernous Turbine Hall and finally descending into the South Tank. The resulting spatial artwork functioned as part of a wider, continuous sequence of spatial encounters, where the historical architecture and displayed artworks directly informed the underlying conceptual framework.
This deep-seated curiosity regarding how a designed setting can shape a live musical experience extends naturally into the realm of pop music and major concert tours. For Rosalía’s Lux Tour, Vanderbroeck collaborated closely with the artist and her creative team, synthesizing disparate references drawn from contemporary fashion, popular culture, theater, and fine art. He characterizes the ambitious project as a comprehensive accumulation of his entire artistic practice, where ideas originating from vastly different creative disciplines converged into a unified whole. "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 reflects.
Beyond the Image
In our modern media landscape, where live events are continuously documented, digitized, and circulated instantly across social media platforms, Dennis Vanderbroeck remains steadfastly focused on the irreplaceable value of physical, in-person experience. While he acknowledges that striking imagery matters immensely—particularly within the image-driven ecosystem of high fashion—he never begins a design process by imagining how a set will appear through the small screen of a mobile phone.
"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 was equally central to the set design for Rosalía’s tour, where live camera direction was carefully choreographed to follow the organic energy of the physical performance rather than pandering exclusively to digital consumption. To Vanderbroeck, capturing an event on film is simply a tool for remembrance, but it can never truly substitute for the multisensory reality of being physically present in the room.
The designer views the widespread contemporary impulse to photograph live events not just as a cultural habit, but as a psychological attempt to anchor a fleeting memory. Pulling out a smartphone can function as a modern mechanism for confirming one’s own physical presence, a desperate bid to hold onto an experience that would otherwise vanish into the past. Yet, a photograph remains fundamentally distinct from the live event, which relies entirely on an unrepeatable arrangement of living bodies, spatial geometry, and elapsed time.
It is precisely this inherent uncertainty that continues to draw Vanderbroeck toward the dramatic arts. Having recently designed the stage set for a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull, he vividly recalls the opening preview before a live audience as a moment of profound vulnerability where, despite months of rigorous preparation, the collective reaction remained entirely unpredictable. "You never can predict how an audience is going to respond," he notes. For the spatial designer, that initial, unfiltered collision between a creative work and its public serves as a humbling reminder of the limits of design. He can meticulously sculpt the environment and establish the optimal conditions for an encounter, but what ultimately happens once the doors open and the people fill the room remains wonderfully beyond his control.
