How to Size and Light a Fashion Show Runway

Why Do Fashion Shows Use White Light Instead of Color?

Because colored light lies about the clothes. A magenta wash turns a cream dress pink. A deep blue flattens a navy suit to black. The garment is the entire reason the room is full, and any color you add sits between the audience and the thing they came to see. Industry practice is full spectrum white at a neutral temperature, avoiding anything too yellow or too blue, so the fabric photographs as it actually is.

Cool white is the setting most shows want. It reads crisp and modern and it keeps whites white rather than creamy. This is worth asking your rental company about directly, because plenty of LED floors only mix red, green and blue, and white built from those three is an approximation that skews. Ours run RGB plus dedicated warm and cool white channels with hue and saturation control, so a true cool white is a setting rather than a compromise.

Save the color for the moments that are not about the clothes. The walk-in, the intermission, the finale after the last look has been seen. During the walk itself, white.

How Wide Should a Runway Be?

Four feet carries a single model. Six feet lets them turn at the tip without stepping off. Eight feet handles pairs, group finales and gowns with trains.

Our floor units are 2ft by 2ft, so width moves in two foot steps. A 4ft catwalk is two units across, 6ft is three, 8ft is four. That also means for a fixed number of units you are trading width against length, which is the real decision.

Six feet is what most of our shows land on. Seton Hall University ran 6 by 20. Bay Plaza Mall in the Bronx ran 6 by 30. Hofstra ran 6 by 50. When we built a runway inside WeWork on West Broadway the room dictated 4 by 14, and that is the right call in a space that size rather than a compromise.

How Long Should a Runway Be?

Run it along the room's long axis, at roughly two thirds the length of the room.

The long axis matters because it lets you seat both sides for the whole walk. The two thirds matters because you need the remaining third for two things. A backstage entrance at one end, hidden or curtained, and space at the tip for photographers and for the audience to close in. A runway that runs wall to wall leaves the models nowhere to come from and the cameras nowhere to stand.

Our first New Jersey show, for Envy by Melissa Gorga at Macaluso's in Hawthorne, was 30 feet. It was the longest we had built at that point. We have gone much further since, including a 50 foot runway at Hofstra University on Long Island. One client at the Venetian Yacht Club in Babylon simply asked for six feet wide and as much length as possible, which is a fair instinct, but the room still gives you the answer.

A runway that runs wall to wall leaves the models nowhere to come from and the photographers nowhere to stand.

How High Should a Runway Sit?

Your seating plan decides this, and it is the number most often got wrong.

With aisle seating, chairs in rows down both sides, a low runway is fine. Eight inches is enough to separate the walk from the floor and to read as a stage.

With banquet seating, guests at round tables, low does not work. Everyone past the first ring of tables ends up watching the backs of other guests' heads. Banquet rooms need real elevation, and often more than one level. Our units stack, so a double or triple level runway is a matter of configuration rather than a custom build. The Hofstra runway sat 16 inches up with wings at the tip for exactly this reason.

If you are booking a room with round tables and a runway, raise this early. It changes the unit count and it is not something to discover during load-in.

What Goes at the End of the Runway?

The tip is where the model pauses, the photographers cluster and the picture that ends up everywhere gets taken. It deserves more thought than the middle.

A T at the tip gives the model somewhere to turn and the cameras a wider angle. We built a 4 by 20 with a 16 foot T for a show at Galloping Hill Caterers in Union, and a T shaped runway in Garwood with a 24 foot walk into a 20 foot cross. Wings do a similar job with less floor, which is what we did at Hofstra.

Lit decor towers flanking the tip frame the shot and give the eye somewhere to land between looks. Bay Plaza had four of them. The Macaluso's runway had two.

The strongest option is a wall. Our units stack into levels, stairs and full walls, so the entrance can be a lit backdrop that the first model steps through rather than a gap in a curtain. If you want one moment from the night to travel, make it that one.

What to Settle Before You Book

Width, length, height and seating plan, in that order, because each one constrains the next. Then the tip. Then lighting, which by then is mostly a question of confirming your provider can hold a true cool white for the walk and change for the finale.

We deliver, install and break down across the tri-state area, from Manhattan and Brooklyn to Long Island, across New Jersey and up through Connecticut. If you tell us the room dimensions and the seating plan, we will tell you the runway that fits it.