Creative lighting designer Nick Gray from Renegade was commissioned by show producers Bacchus to light the main venue at London's first ‘London Collections : Men' a brand new high profile fashion showcase event for menswear, staged at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden.
Gray is a well-known international fashion show lighting designer, and has worked with both Bacchus and their clients, the British Fashion Council on many other projects.
His starting point for the design on this one was a very attractive clean, streamlined set designed by Bacchus including white stretched material ‘walls,' bench seats and large white flats for backdrops in the main room at the Hospital Club, for which the exterior walls were draped in black for contrast and to enhance the clean cut look.
“It was a simple, modular and extremely pleasant environment to light,” comments Gray who chose a daylight colour temperature to keep the brightness, lightness and a sense of ‘bounce' in the air.
The focus of all the lighting fixtures had to be very precise due to the low ceiling and to avoid unwanted light spillage.
The lighting scheme was based on a central spine truss, loaded with around 60 Source Four PARs and a front array of 15 Source Four Profiles – all supplied by rental company Neg Earth.
Gray also used some of the Hospital Club's in-house lighting fixtures, including PARs and 2K fresnels for lighting the white set, and the white muslin walls around the periphery of the space, which utilised 5K fresnels.
His crew chief was Ben Howell and the lighting console operator was Rob Gawler, who used one of Renegade's Chamsys desks.
Upstairs in the exhibition area, Gray also lit several stands with a series of special silver exhibition gallery lights – the sources resembling mini PARs - on silver upright stands, all from specialist, unusual and off-beat lamp suppliers, Shok London.
His offsite shows for the busy ‘London Collections : Men' weekend included SuperDry and Jonathan Saunders.
The Superdry show took place on the top floor of their flagship central London store in Regent Street. Gray chose a series of vintage theatre lights and antique Altman profile spots – also supplied by Shok London - to set the scene and highlight the displays which looked very cool and tied in with SuperDry's retro modernism.
The Jonathan Saunders menswear presentation took place at the fabulous Elms Lesters Painting Rooms and art gallery in London WC2, for which Gray produced a visual design and atmospheric engineering.
Downstairs he had two projectors rigged to project the designer's book images in large format onto the walls, while upstairs, was a collection of classic TV lighting fixtures fitted on chrome push-up stands. These lit the displays and energised the structural elegance of the gallery space, picking out RSJs and other elements and integrating them into the experience.
Says Gray, “It's always really exciting being involved in something completely new. I had the chance to create some completely unique and different visual treatments all in very different spaces – which was very special. Hopefully the whole ‘London Collections : Men' concept will take off and become a regular fixture on the fashion calendar”.