We are in some sense intimately familiar with the stage despite never having walked it, often either curious or utterly disinterested in the unending seasonal parade of haute couture down well-lit catwalks. We know to exhaustion the model of the archetypal runway image, which does little to stimulate any interest in the artistry of the fashion. But backstage, in and around the infrastructure of the illusion, there is a good deal of surprising beauty, stillness, unanticipated delight and engaging comedy to be seen.

———We highlight here a group of photographers whose work subverts some generic runway conventions, and in so doing describes a broader array of the energies that feed into these stylised productions. The stories these pictures tell are engaging because they expand the stage just enough to show why the ‘how’ is more compelling than the ‘what’, why the ‘where’ is as intriguing as the ‘who’. The models cease to be mannequins and become people, infinitely more interesting, wrapped up in a bizarre and wholly unfamiliar milieu. There is something more to these images than the beauty of their subjects. There is also the abiding slightly mysterious sense of place.

The Photographers Béatrice de Géa, Benjamin Lowy, Christopher Anderson, Clive Booth, Evan Sung, Jacques Habbah, Juergen Schabes, Karl Rothenberger, Olivia Frølich, Robert Fairer, Sonny Vandevelde

Photography Courtesy The Photographers Acknowledgment Ida Sandberg at Sandberg Agency, Karen Probasco at Magnum Photos, Nickole Brown at Nickole Brown NYC