This revised feature presents Inside V&A Dundee’s Catwalk Exhibition: 125 Years of Fashion Shows, Spectacle and Scottish Style in a cleaner editorial structure while retaining the original style and fashion context.
Fashion shows can last only minutes, yet the images they create may define a collection for decades. V&A Dundee’s 2026 exhibition Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show explores how that temporary performance evolved from private salon presentations into a global entertainment format watched live on phones around the world.
The exhibition opened on 3 April 2026 and is scheduled to run until 17 January 2027. Co-produced with the Vitra Design Museum, it brings together film, photography, garments, props and archival material covering roughly 125 years of runway history.
Its central argument is that a catwalk is not merely a line of models showing clothes. It is a designed event that combines architecture, music, lighting, hair, make-up, performance, media technology and the movement of bodies through space.
From salons to spectacle
The earliest fashion presentations were much smaller than today’s runway shows. Designers and couture houses presented clothes to private clients in salons where the focus was on seeing garments at close range.
Over time, the audience widened. Department stores, photographers, magazines, celebrities and eventually television and social media turned the fashion show into a public cultural event.
Why the model’s walk matters
A garment changes when it moves. Fabric catches light, tailoring shifts with posture and a coat can look entirely different in motion than on a mannequin.
The model’s pace and attitude therefore become part of the design. A slouch, a sharp turn or a theatrical pause can alter how an audience interprets the same clothing.
The exhibition title in practice
The “art of the fashion show” is visible in the way designers build a temporary world around a collection. Clothing is central, but so are the route, soundtrack, casting and setting.
That is why the exhibition includes more than outfits. Props, film and photographs show how the surrounding performance gives the clothes cultural meaning.
Chanel’s rocket launch
One of the most memorable examples came in 2017 when Chanel staged a show around a branded rocket installation in Paris. The structure rose during the finale, generating images that travelled far beyond the fashion press.
The point was not that the rocket was a functional vehicle. It was theatre: a visual shorthand for futurism, scale and the fantasy world surrounding the collection.
The supermarket show
Chanel had already turned everyday retail into spectacle in 2014 by building a full supermarket set for a runway show. Models moved through aisles filled with specially branded products.
The setting blurred fashion, consumer culture and performance. It also demonstrated how a runway can create a story that audiences remember more clearly than individual garments.
Alexander McQueen and runway theatre
Alexander McQueen is central to any history of the modern fashion show because his presentations often used staging to create drama, discomfort or surprise.
His shows helped establish the idea that a runway could function like experimental theatre while still serving the commercial purpose of presenting a collection.
Why risk can create memorable moments
Fashion-show history includes accidents as well as carefully planned spectacles. The Guardian highlighted a 1971 Ossie Clark show for which a young Manolo Blahnik created shoes whose heels lacked the expected steel support, leaving models wobbling down the runway.
Blahnik feared the moment would damage his career. Instead, it became part of fashion folklore — a reminder that live presentation always contains uncertainty.
Scottish fashion is not an afterthought
V&A Dundee uses the exhibition to highlight Scotland’s contribution to global fashion. The show includes runway looks connected with designers such as Pam Hogg, Christopher Kane, Charles Jeffrey and Nicholas Daley.
That local emphasis prevents the history from being told only through Paris, Milan, London and New York as abstract fashion capitals.
Dior in Perthshire
Scotland has also served as a runway setting for major international houses. Dior staged a collection at Drummond Castle Gardens in Perthshire, drawing on Scottish history and visual references.
Such events show how location can become part of the collection’s message. A castle, garden or industrial building can frame clothes differently from a neutral black runway.
Why fashion shows use extraordinary locations
As audiences gained access through photography, television and streaming, designers needed ways to distinguish one show from thousands of others.
Location became a branding tool. A memorable setting generates press coverage, social sharing and an immediate visual identity before viewers have studied the clothes in detail.
The runway as a media product
For most of fashion history, only a small invited audience saw a show directly. Everyone else encountered it through edited photographs and written reports.
Live streaming changed that hierarchy. A viewer on a phone can now watch the same sequence at nearly the same moment as the person sitting in the front row.
Social media changed the pace
Before social platforms, designers could expect magazine editors to interpret a show over days or weeks. Today, individual looks can become memes within minutes.
That creates pressure to produce instantly recognisable images. It also means a dramatic staging choice may reach a much larger audience than the clothing itself.
Does spectacle distract from design?
Critics sometimes argue that oversized sets and celebrity casting can overwhelm the clothes. That criticism is not new: fashion has long balanced commercial attention with craft.
The exhibition encourages visitors to see spectacle as part of the medium while still asking whether the event serves the collection or becomes the main product.
The economics behind a short event
A runway show may last 10 or 15 minutes, but it can require months of work by designers, producers, stylists, set builders, lighting teams, sound engineers, make-up artists and casting directors.
That makes it a concentrated marketing investment. The show can influence wholesale orders, media coverage, brand perception and social engagement long after the final model leaves the runway.
Why archival material matters
Fashion is often described as obsessed with the new, yet designers constantly reference earlier silhouettes, subcultures and shows.
Archives let audiences see those connections directly. A photograph, invitation, prop or film can reveal how later designers reused or challenged an earlier idea.
Youth culture and the runway
From the 1960s onward, street style and youth subcultures increasingly influenced high fashion. The runway stopped being only a top-down presentation of elite taste.
Designers began absorbing music, club culture, sport, protest and everyday clothing, while young audiences used fashion shows as material for their own identities.
Casting changed too
Runway casting has historically reflected narrow beauty standards, but the industry has faced growing pressure to include a wider range of ages, body types, ethnicities and gender expression.
Progress has been uneven, and representation can sometimes be treated as a seasonal trend. Still, casting itself is now recognised as one of the messages a show communicates.
The catwalk after the pandemic
The pandemic accelerated experiments with digital fashion presentations when traditional audience formats became impossible. Brands used film, virtual environments and hybrid events.
Physical shows returned strongly, but the digital audience remained. Modern runway strategy therefore has to work simultaneously for people in the room and people watching through a screen.
What visitors can expect at V&A Dundee
The exhibition combines original runway pieces with photographs, film and stage material rather than presenting a simple chronological line of dresses on mannequins.
The intention is immersive: visitors are meant to understand how sound, movement and visual staging create the experience of a show.
Why the exhibition matters now
Fashion is increasingly consumed as video. Short clips from runways may reach millions of people who never buy the clothes and may not know the collection name.
Looking back over 125 years shows that this is not a total break with history. Fashion shows have always been communication machines; the technology and size of the audience have changed.
Conclusion
Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show treats the runway as a cultural form in its own right. From salon presentations to rockets, castles and live streams, the show has become a stage on which fashion sells ideas about glamour, rebellion, identity and the future.
For V&A Dundee, the exhibition also places Scottish designers and settings inside that global story, showing that fashion history is not only made in the traditional capitals. It is made wherever clothes, people, performance and an audience come together.
Why a museum can preserve an event designed to disappear
Runway shows are temporary by design. Sets are dismantled and the audience leaves, but archives can preserve film, clothing, invitations and technical material.
A museum exhibition reconstructs enough of that evidence for visitors to study a performance that originally existed for only a few minutes.
How the catwalk became a record of its own era
A runway show is often remembered for clothes, but it also preserves the values and anxieties of the moment in which it was staged. Music, casting, lighting, venue choice and choreography can reveal what a designer wanted an audience to feel about youth, luxury, gender, technology or national identity. Looking back across 125 years therefore turns fashion shows into a form of social history as well as commercial presentation.
This is one reason archival footage is so useful in a museum. A garment on a mannequin can show construction and material; film of the same garment on a runway shows pace, attitude and audience reaction. The exhibition can place those forms of evidence together and let visitors see how much meaning was created by performance around the clothing.
Why Scottish examples matter in a global exhibition
Including designers such as Pam Hogg, Christopher Kane, Charles Jeffrey and Nicholas Daley prevents the story of the catwalk from being reduced to Paris, Milan, London and New York alone. Scotland has contributed designers, makers, textiles, locations and audiences to international fashion culture, while major houses have also used Scottish settings to communicate heritage and drama.
That local-global connection gives the Dundee exhibition a clear purpose. It can celebrate spectacle without treating fashion as something that only happens elsewhere, and it can show younger visitors that a global creative industry is built from many regional histories.
Sources and further reading
See V&A Dundee’s exhibition guide, its 2026 programme announcement and The Guardian’s opening-week report.
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