Bureau Betak Cuts a White Runway Through Water and Mist for Dior

Bureau Betak has transformed Le Bassin Octogonal in Paris's Jardin des Tuileries into a temporary landscape of water, mist and trees for Dior's Summer 2027 women's show. A long white runway cuts across the octagonal basin, surrounded by water and enveloped in drifting clouds of mist. Camphor trees rise from the water around the catwalk, bringing an irregular, living presence to an otherwise highly controlled composition.

The set design firm places nature directly inside the architecture of the show. The runway behaves almost like a bridge, allowing the models to move through the basin while the trees interrupt its strict geometry. The solid white surface meets the shifting water, and mist repeatedly obscures and reveals the landscape around it.

A precise runway against organic forms

The contrast between the runway and the trees gives the installation its central tension. The white catwalk establishes a precise architectural line across the basin, while the camphor trees interrupt that geometry with their uneven trunks, branches and canopies. Mist moves between the two, periodically softening the edges of the architecture and changing the appearance of the landscape.

The audience sits around the perimeter of the basin, looking across the water toward the models as they move along the central path. Water, trees, mist, architecture and spectators form a single spatial composition, with the movement of the models activating the landscape.

According to Dior, the camphor trees brought in for the presentation will later be replanted in the Tuileries. The temporary scenography therefore contains an element that is not temporary at all: living material that continues to grow after the runway, mist and event architecture have disappeared.

Wénwán walnuts bring time and touch into focus

This relationship between controlled structure and natural irregularity extends to the invitation for the collection. A pair of wénwán walnuts sits inside a precisely fitted box, referencing the Chinese tradition of holding and rotating the walnuts against one another in the hand. Through repeated handling, their surfaces gradually develop a smooth patina, while finding two walnuts closely matched in shape and size remains difficult.

'When I came across wénwán walnuts, I was reminded of how we can find knowledge and preciousness in nature,' Jonathan Anderson notes.

The walnuts introduce a slower understanding of time into the show. Their surfaces transform through repeated touch, and their value ties partly to the difficulty of finding perfect pairs. The same tension between precision and variation appears in the scenography: the runway is exact, but the trees are irregular; the basin is geometric, but the mist continually changes its appearance.

Bureau Betak's set creates a framework in which natural elements remain visibly independent of the architecture. Water reflects the models and trees, mist makes the air perceptible, and the living trees resist the fixed geometry of the runway. The result is a scenography built around a balance between what can be designed and what must be allowed to change.

With the camphor trees destined for replanting in the Tuileries, the installation's most durable element will outlast the show itself.

Project info

Name: Dior Summer 2027 Women's Show

Set design: Bureau Betak | @bureaubetak

Creative direction: Jonathan Anderson, Dior

Location: Le Bassin Octogonal, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris