‘Immersive’ exhibitions get a bad rap. And it’s not hard to see why. But if, like me, you find yourself hard-pressed to concentrate on Important Art when troubled by the cares and complexities of life, then digitally amplified sensation and spectacle might be a decent alternative if your museal itch needs scratching in stressful times.
There are two notable options in London right now. The first is Vogue: Inventing the Runway, at the Lightroom in King’s Cross. Drawing on Vogue‘s nearly 150 year old archive, it’s a show about the catwalk’s flashpoints, narrated by Cate Blanchett.
For those who missed the wildly popular and – I hate to admit it – helplessly enjoyable Hockney show at this new centre for immersion, the Lightroom is a vast chamber, in which you have minimalist boxes as seating and a visual and aural narrative presented in a gigantic way all around you.
With this show, I felt dazzled and very old. I could not keep up. I felt I was stuck in the bowels of TikTok. With no fewer than 60 designers included, it was catwalk after catwalk after catwalk. Blanchett’s descriptions were mostly one sentence or less. Here were the 1980s. Here was 2020. Here was 1996. Here was Patrick Kelly, the first American – and African-American – to be admitted to the governing body of the ready-to-wear industry. Here was Azzadine Alaia seen in a black and white snap in his Paris flat at… some point. Here was Karl Lagerfield using the Great Wall of China as the backdrop to a Fendi show in 2007 (I loved this).
There is very little history here. You get the odd blink-and-you-miss-it grainy snapshot of the prewar fashion show, when they were for clients, not media and celebrities. Why is Vogue afraid of the richness of the past it helped shape?
But it’s still pleasurable to sit there and watch beautiful people parading to loud, clubby tunes. And you’ll either be amused or depressed by the sheer frivolity of the runway world, as there is nothing money won’t be liberated for in the service of this pursuit. I watched delightedly as Karl Lagerfeld displayed Chanel’s clout in 2017 with a big, camp, life-size rocket which, emblazoned with the big CCs, fired up and rose to the top of the Grand Palais. It was also impressive to see the stars align for Pharrell Williams’s 2023 Pont Neuf show for Louis Vuitton. Billions tuned in to watch.
In the end, you are not immersed in any ‘story’, but instead swamped by a parade of jump cuts. This is a show for people all too used to the rhythms of social media. It was repetitious and right-on. Yet it was a nice enough way to glimpse insidery bits of a world that feels forever out of reach but is still fascinating, even to the sartorially hopeless among us.
Bubble Planet: An Immersive Experience, meanwhile, which turned out to be subtly substantial, rather mournful, and replete with much science and history. ‘Of the many forms existing in nature, it seems obvious that the world’s systems prefer the sphere,’ read one caption. We journeyed through the history of celestial bodies and the physics of soap bubbles, from surface tension to molecular behaviour.
In tandem with this dense signage were a series of rooms – in pastel hues – featuring balloons, bubbles, balls and sometimes just surreal screens showing otherworldly cityscapes. I brought my baby and for both of us, the swimming pool filled with little clear white balls and studded with oversized inflatable figures was particularly gratifying. My back hurt and I could sink amid the plastic lather, baby safe and amused. In one room, a robotic arm prepared and blew bubbles.
Neither immersions are cheap, and it’s hardly high-brow stuff but both offer temporary respite from life’s woes.
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