A hundred years ago, runways were silent. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, designers wanted the song of the season to soundtrack their collections. Enter the common era of precision-driven soundtracks, sound stylists, and the fashion show as a multi-sensory event. Leading the vanguard of designers collaborating with sound artists to create a narrative on the runway is Peter Do.
The theme of Vietnamese-American designer Peter Do’s SS23 collection was “TIME.” Wearing Do’s signature tailoring, models walked through crowds gathered last September on the 59th floor of the Liberty Building, in New York City, saturated by a sound sculpture that kept pace with the models’ brisk movements. Not so much music, the distinctive pulse was more like restless atoms in an active exchange with negative space.
In the final moments of the show, a guitar solo entered to synchronize with the tempo. Alongside the garments on parade, this soundscape by the anonymous BIPOC collective SHLVES added poignant structure to the show’s overall narrative, which was, undeniably, the inexorable forward march of time.
“[Do] has a very poetic sensibility,” says Gayle Dizon, founder of Dizon INC, the creative production studio behind numerous fashion shows, including Do’s. “He’s a literature nut and a music nut… sounds communicate to Peter. And it’s very personal, which is why none of [his] soundtracks are the same.”
In fact, music set the tone for the SS23 collection long before the show even opened. Do’s invitations, which went out in cookie tins or “memory boxes” — a nod to the Asian practice of repurposing such containers for storage — included a curated old-school mix CD featuring various SM Entertainment artists that also happened to be the sounds of Do’s upbringing.
Over the years, and alongside the evolution of the fashion industry, a collection’s runway debut has increasingly become a full sensory experience. Once upon a time, however, the only thing on…
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