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The last time you’ll see Alexandre de Betak wear his signature producer headset will be at the Fendi show on Thursday during couture week. Then, he will start a new chapter. He is handing over the reins of Bureau Betak, the fashion show production company he created in 1990, to become creative chairman of its parent company, The Independents.
In the newly created role, Betak will be responsible for spotting creative talent — individuals or companies — from various fields, such as art, scenography, film and technology, to incubate through support and investment or to bring into The Independents fold. The group, which was founded by Olivier and Isabelle Chouvet, owns the likes of PR and branding agency Karla Otto and influencer marketing platform Lefty. Betak sold The Independents a majority stake in his business in September 2021.
“I intend, with The Independents, to help incubate young talents in areas that are complementary to ours or even historically competitive,” Betak tells Vogue Business. “My creative vision will be applied to a long-term strategy.” This will include Web3. “The true Web3 revolution is not the metaverse or NFTs, it’s being able to have individualised interactions with each person in your audience. We’re still at the beginning of it, all of us, in communications,” he says.
Last month, The Independents announced a $400 million investment led by investment management firm Towerbrook and FL Entertainment, a media group founded by entrepreneur Stéphane Courbit. The financial backing will be used to “support the company in realising its ambition to more than double in size by 2025, through a strong acquisition strategy and dynamic international expansion”, a joint press release said. The Independents, which also owns event organiser K2, Dubai-based agency The Qode and, since March 2023, US creative agency Prodject, said its group revenue is expected to reach $450 million in 2023 (it doesn’t break down revenue by agency).
More acquisitions are on the agenda: “We are fortunate to have the means to acquire partners,” says Betak. “It’s about how traditional scenographic ideas can be further enhanced thanks to communications strategy — AI, algorithms, etc — in order to provide new solutions to houses and designers,” says Betak. “The world is in a period of transition; fashion, luxury are in a transition, with a generational shift and values that I feel strongly about: sustainability, inclusivity, cultural integration.”
Revolutionising the fashion show
The new role marks a significant shift for Betak, who over the past three decades has built a reputation for producing spectacular shows that combine choreography, synchronisation, music, lighting and technology. “These are my tools. Sometimes, people say they are my toys. I’ve done it all my life,” says Betak.
After high school, Betak enrolled at the Sorbonne to study philosophy and Italian but quit the prestigious Parisian university after an hour. “I was too impatient,” he explains. He started freelancing in fashion production. “I was doing all these things — taking pictures, helping fashion designers, scouting models, producing shoots — without putting a name on it,” he recalled during an Instagram live. He produced his first show for Spanish designer Sybilla at age 19, and shows for Prada followed very early on.
By 1990 he created Bureau Betak, and in 1993 moved to New York. “People were putting me in a box in Paris and also Paris was becoming too French so I said: ‘I gotta run out of here’. In New York, I was a little frog, the Frenchie in America. The accent alone helps you get started.” In 1999, he began collaborating with Dior, working with John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri — a partnership that continues 24 years later. Remember the Dior shows by Raf Simons with the mountain of flowers and the crane and the ones with scaffolding? That was by Bureau Betak.
The Victoria’s Secret show in Cannes in May 2000, the first annual show of the lingerie brand, was also by Bureau Betak. Later on, it became a TV special. “I had the cameras low-angled so that the woman, as she walked along, was not an object coming out of a gift box but a bigger-than-life goddess. I worked a lot on the nuances of the lighting, the music and choreography, all the finer points to contribute to values that I believe in: the respect for women.”
Other milestones include the Hussein Chalayan shows conceived as “a theatre with the public on one side only”. He also produced Rodarte’s shows from the beginning. “We did group finales to put more looks of the collection in a single image. It was [at] the beginning of Instagram,” Betak recalls.
Then, there was the Saint Laurent show with the Eiffel Tower in the background, and the Jacquemus shows in French lavender fields in 2019 and in wheatfields in July 2020 (the first physical fashion show in France after the Covid lockdown) and most recently at the Château de Versailles. The show in the lavender fields marked “a real shift: how an intimate public and minimal technical resources can have maximum impact”, Betak says.
Of the decision to hand over the reins of his company, he says: “I had already started taking a step back from day-to-day operations when I sold the majority stake of Bureau Betak. I am very lucky to have long-time partners — a large team in New York, Paris, Shanghai and Los Angeles that keeps growing and keeps impressing me. I am very proud. Today, Bureau Betak is doing better than ever. I am very serene. Also, my teams are more adapted to the houses’ processes nowadays than I am. There’s a side of me that everyone knows: I am a little too opinionated.”
Chiuri, Dior artistic director of women’s collections, confirms that Betak is opinionated. “Probably that has helped us because we can speak frankly, like a family.” She adds: “I am very happy for him. What I hope for him is a beautiful new energy. A new chapter always gives new energy.”
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