Philipp Plein Milan Fashion week

Philipp Plein

Cameras on an 8 metre ring backstage

3,000W

Of flash, bounced off the venue roof

30min

From last shot to drives handed over

The biggest Milan Fashion Week show since 1958: a 60 camera ring backstage, a gold mirrored floor that fought the laws of light, and a 4am pack down straight into the next job.

What Did We Do?

In early February 2020 we drove from Sunderland to Lugano in Switzerland for a two hour meeting at Philipp Plein’s HQ. Worth it: they were staging the biggest show Milan Fashion Week had seen since it began in 1958, and wanted bullet time in it.

Flying the kit was impractical, so the trusty Transit set off three days early for contingency. The weather was kind, so we took the scenic route until a two metre snow wall on the Nufenen Pass turned us around, with a GoPro on the windscreen filming a timelapse of the whole journey.

The show, at Fiera Milano City, was deliberately as over the top as money could buy: seating for over 3,000 guests around a runway threading between gold wrapped Lamborghinis, a fighter jet, a helicopter and a powerboat, with guests including Missy Elliott, Jada Pinkett Smith, Timbaland and Maye Musk. Nobody in the room yet knew covid was already spreading through Italy.

Backstage we built a 60 camera, 8 metre bullet time ring around a gold foil lined cylinder made to size by the set builders, running 7 computers and 6 wiring looms. The creative centrepiece was also the photographic nightmare we had warned about: a gold mirrored floor. Our three 1000 watt Elinchrom flash heads reflected off it even at one sixth power, and the art director’s guidance was that Mr Plein does not care about the physics of light. So we defied physics: full power, bounced off the venue roof, with just enough feathered light coming back to expose the shots. The fake $100 bills soon covering the floor from the gold money guns helped too.

The real job was capturing the looks fresh off the catwalk for the website and social channels. Hundreds of models over many hours, every sequence built by our own software, with fully aligned movies plus raw image folders on a hard drive within 30 minutes of the final shot.

It was Tom’s birthday. There was no celebration. Packed by 4am, van keys handed to a return driver we had flown in, airport by 6am, and by 10am we were walking into ExCel London to start building a different van full of kit at a trade show. Never a dull day.