Renegade Light Up London Fashion Week

London based creative lighting design consultancy Renegade, designed lighting for the main British Fashion Council (BFC) Tent and peripheral areas in and around Somerset House for the recent London Fashion Week event, together with 4 major innovative off site shows for the Matthew Williamson, Temperley, Julien Macdonald and Hardy Amies collections.

Renegade's Nick Gray once again created the lighting designs to ensure the media had perfectly colour balanced environments to capture the shots which characterise the event.

It was the fourth consecutive season for Gray lighting the important BFC tent, constructed in the grounds of Somerset House, one of London's most historically significant landmarks. The design was based on a single central truss, flanked by two off centre trusses and a flown, raked front-of-house grid.

For strong cross lighting onto the back wall/entrance, and for producing dramatic silhouette effects, he positioned 12 x Svobodas - to deliver a very bright quasi-parallel light beam/curtain effect at the top of the runway. The overhead lighting consisted of 140 ETC Source Four profiles with a variety of different lenses, and the seats were lit with Bambino fresnels. The whole lighting aesthetic and raison d'être was to depart from a purely tungsten 'classic' rig and match the more natural and organic look of the tent this year which featured a wooden floor.

Gray also specified some 10K projectors for producing 'specials' on a cyc for selected shows, and all lighting was run from a grandMA console, operated by Paulus van Heijkant. The lighting crew chief was Ben Howells and the equipment for the tent was supplied by award winning London based rental company, Neg Earth.

Gray's brief also included the lighting of several other LFW areas within the BFC Tent and Somerset House, including the Reception. Here he chose 8 of the brand new Moll Richardson silver 5K Sky Pans, utilised to create a general wash. They were accompanied by 30 chrome PAR lights, all hung on 2 trusses installed in the roof.

In the BFC Lounge area, Gray went for a synergous but different look, sourcing a quantity of orange 50cm Tom Dixon fluorescent globes and 8 classic MacLamp angle poise lamps (designed by interior style guru Terrance Conran in the 1960s) in gold, red and yellow. The idea was to produce a clean, clear timelessly stylish environment with the lighting fixtures forming the scenery as much as they were used as practical lightsources. All these bespoke fixtures were supplied by Shok London.