Echo Nu – Obscure Poem. A sonic couture ritual for fashion houses and luxury brands.

Sometimes I play music not for the sound.
But to remember who I was that night when red wasn’t a color, Я but a decision.

Sunday, July 27

Color of the Day:
Milky quartz with candlelight shimmer

Description:
This is the light that passed through thick curtains. Not quite white — it’s a softened reflection of care. The color of a morning bath in a hotel, where water touches marble and the air carries the scent of a fresh magazine. Sunday feels like the inner silk of a dress no one ever sees. Everything slows down, everything softens, like sound absorbed into the velvet of an armchair. What matters here is not a gesture, but the breath between the pages.

Palette:
Ivory hue, warm marble, candlelight through mist, almond shadow, ashen stone

Texture:
Skin carrying the trace of a pillow, paper steeped in perfume, marble dust at twilight, silk absorbed by silence

Phrase of the Day:
“I choose a state, not an event. Sunday requires no gesture. It receives. It echoes without a goal, like the rustle of silk on a sofa where you read a magazine without a table of contents.”

Transition Note:
The name of Saturday still lingers in the air, but Monday’s silence is already beginning to surface.

Director of the Day:
Rungano Nyoni

Sound of the Day:
Michael Gaubert — Chanel Haute Couture SS18 Mix

Saturday, July 26

Color of the Day: Grey nephrite

Description: A shadow hides in stone coolness. Inside the day — a pause. Dust from a fingertip rests on the windowsill, which smells like salt. The wind brushes the temple as if calling it by name. This is a day between two pages — Friday still breathes on one, Sunday already lies on the other. In that pause, you hear the speech of a lake.

Palette: Weathered cement, silvered air, pale basalt

Texture: Stone touched by rain. A surface once looked upon. Frozen rowan bark

Director of the Day: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Sound of the Day: Félicia Atkinson — The Lake Is Speaking

Sometimes I play music not for hearing.
But to remember who I was that evening,
when red was not a color, but a decision.

Sound as Fabric Choreography

The show begins before the lights. Not with a gesture, not with a step, but with a vibration. The frequency of not-yet-formed air — what sounds before music. Hidden in this first noise is the architectural code of the fashion performance. And if in the past music was chosen as background, today sound has become a co-author. A scenographer. A perfumer of the invisible. Noise is luxury, and luxury has learned to sound. Frédéric Sanchez doesn’t work like a DJ, but like a director. His tracks are assembled not by BPM, but by metaphysics. He works in categories of time architecture. Prada shows under his sound design are scenes that cannot exist in silence. The Fall/Winter 2019 show began with a rumble, as if a massive set piece was being lifted in a factory. It was an industrial creak. Indistinct, but familiar. Something we heard in childhood — at construction sites, in the subway, in elevators. Low, heavy, vibrating metal. It pushed the space apart. It created the feeling that what was about to be told was not a collection, but an era. Noise as metaphor — this is the language of Saint Laurent in Anthony Vaccarello’s era. His shows sound like a drone. A long, echoing tone, with no melody, no rhythm. Only tension. A note, like a taut string, stretches through the entire show, creating a theatrical arch. We don’t hear it — we live in it. These echoing planes became the architecture of sound. They hold the space of the show no less than concrete. And when the first model appears — she enters an already built acoustic hall. In fashion, sound has become a tool of plasticity. At Prada, for example, silence is used as relief. Between two tracks, a gaping silence often arises. It’s not just a pause. It’s a technique that directs attention. Like a pause between two breaths. Or like an empty gallery in a museum between two works — so the eyes can clear. Such sound is not entertainment — it is acoustic asceticism. The ability to let stillness speak. At Saint Laurent, sound is catastrophe. The Maison’s sound designers use noise like a black veil. It cannot be read — only lived. In one of the Spring-Winter shows, monotonous radio noise played — as if someone were catching signals from other planets. And this created the necessary feeling of isolation. The clothing felt like a spacesuit. The city — unreachable. The stage — a Martian platform. Noise ceases to be décor — it becomes the setting. Sound in luxury functions like skin in haute couture — it gives the object density. Good sound design is when a coat feels heavier than it is. When a model’s step becomes a gunshot. When a glance can be heard. This is exactly how Frédéric Sanchez’s system works. He, like an editor from a Godard film, cuts, glues, layers noises to create an acoustic script. His music is not a track — it’s a narrative. He introduced into fashion the concept of tracks with a delayed effect — when you hear a strange song, don’t recognize it, but it returns to you at night. The retro-shock effect. Koudlam is another hero of this era. His tracks played at shows for Dior Homme, Balenciaga, Rick Owens. He has industrial monumentality. His tracks seem to build towers in the air. They are not about fashion. They are about civilization. His music is like the sound of a rusty antenna receiving the last signals of a vanished world. When he plays — the show space stops being fashionable. It becomes technogenic. In Japanese culture, there is the concept of ma — the silence between sounds. The space where nothing happens. It is precisely ma that makes the emergence of form possible. Frédéric Sanchez intuitively uses this technique. His sound in Margiela, Jil Sander, Miu Miu is built not on volume, but on incompletion. This is true luxury — not to fill everything. To leave space for listening. Now, in the TikTok era, where a track lasts 15 seconds, sound design in a fashion show sounds like a manifesto. A manifesto of depth. A claim for experience. Saint Laurent shows at the opera house under the open sky sound like a city play. They don’t compete with city noise — they use it. It’s stunning to hear how the sound of wind becomes part of the score. Or how footsteps on marble write the rhythm of the collection. Sound has become the choreographer of fabric. This aesthetic came from cinema. The directors of fashion sound are heirs to Bergman, Tarkovsky, Wong Kar-wai. Sound is smoke that holds the scene. Sound shows what cannot be seen. That’s why today, a fashion show without considered sound — is a dead defilé. Sound has become aura. It carries the brand’s entire intonation. At Balenciaga — it’s the rumble of approaching apocalypse. At Prada — a sound montage from the 20th century. At Loewe — an installation of silence, like in a museum. At Ann Demeulemeester — the rustle of Belgian poetry. All this is language. Sound in fashion has become a new form of writing. When we say “fashion sounds,” we no longer mean a soundtrack. We mean an entire acoustic architecture where each frequency carries meaning. Steps, strikes, pauses, static, hum — all bricks in a new building of the show. A house made of sound. And in this house, noise is luxury. Not because it is expensive — but because it is conscious. Like perfume without packaging. Like fabric touched in the dark. Like a voice sounding from within.

Michael Gaubert

Who he is:
Michael Gaubert is the maestro of fashion radio — the man through whom Chanel, Dior, Valentino, Loewe, Sacai, Louis Vuitton and Celine speak their sonic language. A Brit raised in London on the sound of the 80s: synth-pop, early house, Factory and Rough Trade labels. In his youth, he worked at a record shop in Covent Garden, clubbed with McQueen, and created a cult morning show on Kiss FM. Then came Paris, fashion, sound as a form of atmosphere. Since the late ’90s — the constant sound director for Karl Lagerfeld, friend of Nicolas Ghesquière, collaborator of Michele, Owens, and Slimane. He has a talent for sensing what will resonate — not now, but three years from now. His music is like hotel lobby lighting: you don’t hear it, but it changes the air. His playlists aren’t compilations — they are time adjustments: rare jazz + electronics + Brigitte Bardot + lavender-flavored house. He runs Instagram like a mood library, collects sound archives, collaborated with SHOWstudio, and creates audio theatre. His music is the architecture of presence, detached from stage. He turned silence into a design element within the show.

Écho:
Pearl-lined radio. Electro-velvet. Words threading through magnetic tape.
You enter the lobby — and the sound follows, like a porter.
The music flows through a channel embedded in the parquet. It doesn't play — it echoes a world where everything already happened, and you're simply remembering.

Color:
Glossy cream with a trace of sunset fuchsia.
The color of a distant hotel hall at Meurice. The color of shadow beneath a lacquered sole at a Valentino show.
A micro-particle of pearl polish in evening light.

Broadcast director:
Karl Lagerfeld. Chanel, Haute Couture SS 2018.
(Smooth modular transitions from orchestral ballad to ambient with drops of water. No pauses — only diffused light that sounded.)

Album frame:
A bar at 3 PM. Empty. On the counter — a glass with a slowly melting ice cube. Outside — light like in a Louis Malle film. Music plays from somewhere deep inside, and you suddenly realize you’ve heard it all your life — but only today, for the first time.

Gallery tracks:
• Michael Gaubert — Chanel Haute Couture SS18 Mix
• Michael Gaubert — Valentino FW17 Soundtrack
• Michael Gaubert — Dior Homme SS15 Show Mix
• Michael Gaubert — Louis Vuitton Cruise 2019 Audio Atmosphere

Elena Colombi

Who she is:
A name that sounds like the password to an underground gallery, where the air crackles with electricity and sound becomes a form of intuition. An Italian DJ, sound curator, alchemist of space, living in London. Her sets are a drift through foggy coordinates of desire and unease. Colombi works like an editor of anomalies: techno, Japanese synthesizer minimalism, psychedelic electronics, archival radio samples, field recordings, ambient, post-industrial fragments. She builds her sets as narratives — not in letters, but in sound. As if Peter Greenaway were recording dreams in the metro.

Her performances are sound installations, where each fragment shifts the temperature. She’s not invited to “play music,” but to create a dimension. Colombi has performed for Kenzo, Acne Studios, Bottega Veneta — in each case, as the inner voice of the collection, a whisper beneath the fabric.

Since 2019, she has curated her own label Osàre! Editions — a publishing house of intuitive sound, an archaeology of inner impulse. It releases artists who don’t compose tracks, but capture sound before it is born. Colombi transforms radio airwaves into an archaic sensorium, and the club into a weather chamber where emotions sync with volume.

Écho:
Wrist temperature in a tunnel, micro-pulse of air from an approaching train, shimmer of light on the cheek. She creates echoes that are felt through the skin.

Color:
Neon indigo. Asphalt in heat. Ultramarine with malachite. The deep shadow of blue pulsing like current.

Texture:
Metal in reflection. A cascade of crystals in murky water. Light ripple on the elevator wall. Tactility like a gallery without objects.

Director of the ether:
Kenneth Anger

Album shot:
A face in the tunnel where the light ends. A single earphone glints. Lips whisper invisible words. Behind — a blinking green light.

Tracks for the gallery:
— NTS: Rituals of Dusk
— Iridescence
— Water Prayer
— Hyperwave Fragment

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