When he was 54 years old, Alexandre de Betak, the man who did more than anyone to transform the traditional catwalk shows of the last century into the no-holds-barred spectacles they are today, the man The New York Times once called “the Fellini of fashion,” decided to start over.
After more than 2,000 productions, including a Dior show featuring a 59-foot-tall mountain covered in a sea of blue delphiniums and a Saint Laurent men’s extravaganza on Liberty Island for which he built a futuristic structure out of so much scaffolding that it filled 24 trailers, he no longer wanted to be part of the constant promotion of new stuff. He no longer really believed in the values of the industry he had built a career on celebrating.
But the show system, like life, has a momentum of its own. It can be almost impossible to walk away. For de Betak, it took a personal tragedy — the unexpected death of a son — for him to realize it was time.
“I believe there was a sign, maybe, that I had to do what I felt was most important for me,” he said on a Zoom call late last month from his London office. “But I hadn’t planned exactly how and when, and maybe my son passed me a message that it’s time I move on to what really matters. It probably gave me the strength that I might not have had, had everything been fine.”
A year later, he extricated himself from the business he founded when he was 18 and that bears his name, Bureau Betak; moved (mostly) from Paris to London; and reinvented himself as an artist, making sculptures from the detritus of his old life — steel trusses, stage lights, scaffolding — recast in aluminum and bronze.
The idea of a late-stage career change is something many people talk about, and few do. “It’s a lot of pressure,” said Ezra Petronio, founder of a namesake creative agency as well as the magazine Self-Service, who has been close friends with de Betak since they were 8.
De Betak, now 58, was “the center of the world in fashion for 30 years,” Petronio said. “Leaving that, it’s a lot. What he’s doing right now is very risky. But he’s willing to live these dreams.”
For the last three years, he has been living them mostly in secret, closeted in a mews house in Marylebone, where he works in a ground-floor studio painted entirely in glossy black. He lives on the floor above in a bare-bones set of rooms painted all white, with almost nothing on the walls.
This week, however, that will all change. He is having his first solo show at a New York gallery, Salon 94, and his choice will be laid bare for all to see.
“The shoes of the older young artist are really weird shoes,” de Betak said. “When you’re young and you start, it’s cool. But when you’ve done a lot and people think they know you, they’ve already categorized you. All my life I was the artistic guy of the fashion world. Now I am ‘the fashion guy of the art world.’ People don’t really understand it.”
He recalled that even his wife, Sofia Sanchez de Betak, asked, “You really want to go through that?”
Saying Farewell to Fashion
De Betak’s house in London is a stark contrast from his Left Bank apartment in Paris, a sprawling duplex filled with vintage furniture. (He almost never buys anything new, including clothes, which for years he has bought from the same two vintage dealers in the Clignancourt flea market.) There is also a hidden hangout/guest room on a lower level painted midnight blue with a ceiling of little stars, and the occasional piece of “Star Wars” memorabilia.
That is itself a far cry from his home in Majorca, which de Betak reimagined as an earth-tone organic structure made from reclaimed materials with almost no hard edges and where his wife lives with their 8-year-old daughter. De Betak also has a son, 23, from a previous relationship, who is still in Paris and was the younger brother of the son de Betak says is “in the sky.” He talks about his elder son often, even as his eyes involuntarily fill with tears.
These days he commutes between the three homes. For him the mews house represents “an intentionally blank canvas.” He has effectively made himself a metaphor to live in (which he knows). The black downstairs is so glossy it becomes a sort of reflective surface that creates its own glow: out of the darkness, the light. The unadorned upstairs is his new page.
“Basically, it’s the start-up of a new life,” he said.
The old life was the one in Paris, where de Betak was “the wizard in the land of Oz,” said Sally Singer, president of the creative agency Art & Commerce (and a former editor of T magazine), who has known de Betak since 1998.
Not that he ever intended to play that role. De Betak fell into fashion by mistake, through photography, and learned his craft on the fly. Before the Spanish designer Sybilla asked him to orchestrate one of her shows when he was 19, “I’d never come to a fashion show,” he said. But then Prada came calling, then John Bartlett and Donna Karan and then John Galliano, which led to Dior.
“Without him, the success of Dior, the success of John, of Raf, my 24 years, what we have achieved, would not have happened,” said Sidney Toledano, the former chief executive of Dior. “Behind the scenes, he has been one of the most important people in fashion.” His genius was in creating the theater that made a designer’s ideas come to life.
Still, even as his career took off, de Betak was becoming uncomfortable with the ephemerality of fashion. In 2020, he published an open manifesto, “Better Betak,” which shared approaches for making fashion shows more sustainable. By September 2021, when he sold his business to the Independents creative collective, he had started to think about getting out.
“There is an economic, a moral and an ecological crisis, and I could not continue to help promote what I don’t really believe in,” he said. “What I wanted was to continue to create but with no commercial or artistic compromising, with a real freedom to say only what I wanted to say.”
De Betak’s friends were not surprised when he made the switch. Both because, Petronio said, losing his son “probably did trigger some sort of deeper soul-searching on how he wants to spend the rest of his life,” and because, said Diana Picasso, who has known de Betak for decades, “he’s always been talking about sculptures, about lighting, about installations.”
She added: “For him, it’s not drastic. It’s a continuation of something.”
Indeed, most of the technical innovations in de Betak’s shows were his own inventions. He has a compulsive need to design all of his surroundings. Recently, Singer said, he has been trying to persuade the elderly woman whose London house faces his own to replace her plastic garbage bin, directly in his line of sight, with something more aesthetically pleasing.
He has never gone in for half measures. He is a good cook, but in Majorca, his favorite thing is “making pasta for the entire village,” Picasso said, meaning at least 100 people. When Petronio turned 50, de Betak threw him a party that mimicked the parties they had had in the 1980s, complete with bowls of their favorite pink candies from high school and a room for slow dancing.
He was never going to tiptoe gingerly into the art world.
Something Nobody Else Could Make
A few days before the opening, de Betak was standing on the second floor of Salon 94 wearing brown zip-up coveralls and supervising the installation of a bronze construction that called to mind both Versailles and an erector set.
He had picked up a cold on the plane and had an old pashmina slung around his neck. He and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the gallerist, were debating whether the sculpture should be hung an inch higher or lower as guys on towering scissor lifts bounced up and down.
“I’m pretty good at thinking big and at making big, maybe because I’ve done it forever,” de Betak said.
The problem with starting so big, of course, is that unlike, say, pen and ink drawings, de Betak projects can be very expensive. “I didn’t really think of that when I entered this new part of my life,” he said. “Right now there are a few projects I’m working on that are large public installations that will require more funds than I have. I am good at many things, but I really don’t know how to ask for money.”
The first public piece de Betak ever made was done on spec, last February, at Gstaad Art Week. He found an old Alpine storage hut and transformed it into a glowing vortex with hundreds of what looked like tubular fluorescent lights set atop mirrors, so it played havoc with a viewer’s sense of direction.
In the meantime, de Betak reached out to Rohatyn, whose gallery is known for blurring the line between art and decorative objects. At first she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“It takes a lot to get me to a studio visit,” she said. Still, in July 2025 she went to see him in Paris.
“We had a long discussion about what it would mean for him to make these light sculptures,” she said. She liked them because she thought they were “something nobody else could have made, given his history.”
“He’s literally made miles and miles and miles of shows with light,” she said. “So he is an expert at light, and these particular lights and trusses, they’re almost a part of his body, like an instrument.”
The sculptures that will be on display at Salon 94 — the show is called “Truss Light Sculptures 01” — were fabricated in France, Sweden, China, Japan and Canada, and range from just over two feet to 12-and-a-half-feet tall. The lightest weighs 66 pounds, the heaviest 450. It was Rohatyn’s idea to cast some of them in bronze because, she said, “these are glamorous objects, and I thought the bronze would be glamorous.” She compares them to a modern Tatlin’s Tower.
They also function as actual lighting fixtures, albeit pretty fancy ones. Each light can fade from cold white to a warmer yellow, and they can be programmed to “sparkle,” “dance,” “breath.” (The sculptures come with their own control boxes.) De Betak also designed the electronics, even the lightbulbs.
For de Betak, they are partly about his own history and partly about his desire to make himself an example of change. What he wants is people, including people he used to work with in the fashion world, to consider the possibility of using their power to make something less disposable, something, he said, “that is maybe more interesting than shoes and bags.” If he has to put himself on the line to do it, he’s OK with that.
“I keep telling him, ‘You don’t need the validation of the art world,’” Petronio said. “That’s my personal thing as a friend to him. But it’s nice to see that there’s hope. You can reimagine yourself.”
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