Three Monumental Chandeliers Turn Trocadéro Into Saint Laurent's Ballroom
Saint Laurent's SS27 womenswear show at the Trocadéro featured three monumental chandeliers by Bureau Betak, recreating the Hôtel InterContinental ballroom as open-air urban scenography.
- Section
- Architecture
- Author
- By Marcus Bennett
- Filed
- Length
- 2 min read
Key takeaways
- Three monumental chandeliers by Bureau Betak framed Saint Laurent's Spring Summer 2027 womenswear runway at the Trocadéro in Paris.
- The set recalled the ballroom of the Hôtel InterContinental, where Yves Saint Laurent historically presented haute couture collections.
- Gold ran through both collection and environment, with lamé, brocade and metallic surfaces interacting with the chandeliers' warm light.
Three monumental chandeliers suspended above a runway at the Trocadéro in Paris recreated the ballroom of the Hôtel InterContinental, where Yves Saint Laurent once presented his haute couture collections. The set, staged for Saint Laurent's Spring Summer 2027 womenswear show, was conceived with Bureau Betak under creative direction attributed by the project information to Jonathan Anderson, while the show concept has been widely associated with Anthony Vaccarello's tenure at the house.
The scenography does something structurally unusual: it builds a room without walls. What was once an enclosed, ceremonial setting was opened to the city, with the Eiffel Tower completing a backdrop that hardly needed help. The chandeliers function as a suspended ceiling, marking out a temporary ballroom in the open air and leaving the surrounding Paris cityscape fully visible.
Rather than reconstructing the historic room wall by wall, the design extracts its essential ingredients: theatrical lighting, a formal runway, symmetry, and the warm glow of gold. The scale of the fixtures shifts the reference away from reproduction and toward abstraction, turning an interior design code into a piece of urban scenography.
The ballroom reference is tied directly to the house's history. Yves Saint Laurent used the Hôtel InterContinental as the setting for his couture presentations, surrounding the collections with chandeliers, ornate interiors and a deliberately heightened sense of occasion. The new production keeps that formality intact but transports it into a very different architectural condition — an expansive public plaza where Paris itself becomes part of the set.
Against the monumental proportions of the Trocadéro, the three chandeliers operate almost like temporary architecture. Their suspended silhouettes establish points of light above the long runway. The result balances nostalgia with spectacle without collapsing into a period room. Bureau Betak scaled up a familiar Saint Laurent motif until it could compete visually with one of the most photographed views in Paris.
Gold runs through both the collection and the environment. Lamé, brocade and metallic surfaces picked up the warm illumination of the chandeliers, allowing the garments to read as moving extensions of the set rather than objects passing through it. Under the lights, different tones of gold shifted from reflective and almost liquid to darker, heavier surfaces, reinforcing the material dialogue between runway, clothing and scenography.
The installation ultimately treats the Saint Laurent archive less as something to reproduce than something to enlarge, relocate and slightly exaggerate. A ballroom became an outdoor room. Chandeliers became urban-scale objects. The Paris skyline replaced decorated walls. For a collection built around gold, restraint was never going to be the point — Bureau Betak made the historical reference visible from across the square.
Project information
- Name: Saint Laurent Spring Summer 2027 womenswear
- Brand: Saint Laurent
- Creative director: Jonathan Anderson (per project credits; Anthony Vaccarello is credited with the set's conception in the show announcement)
- Set design: Bureau Betak
- Location: Trocadéro, Paris, France
Original: bureaubetak.com
