Inside the Design of Rihanna’s Slick, Star-Studded Savage x Fenty Fashion Show

As much as the hotel’s architecture informed the run of show—for example, the elevators are used to transition between scenes—Perron and his team did intervene a bit to take the space from bustling, functioning hotel to camera-ready performance space. “As far as look, it was mostly about cleaning up the building and giving it some identity,” he tells AD. “There are a lot of storefronts in the main stair scene, so we had to camouflage and hide all of those using drapes. We also re-carpeted all of the inside areas and some of the exterior areas.”

When viewers first see Rihanna, she’s writhing on a couch in an area that evokes a VIP section at a nightclub. “The seating pods existed, which are an incredibly iconic part of the architecture, but we remade them for the purpose of choreography and to match the show color,” Perron says.

Color is used throughout to define different scenes (at one point Normani performs inside an entirely red room), but much of that color is achieved using lighting, which makes for a very slick, action-movie inspired look. “I kept thinking about films in DTLA, these sweaty summer nights and highly saturated films like Heat, lots of Michael Mann films… it’s an exaggerated version of those,” Perron says.

The whole thing was filmed without any audience over the course of a few days, with the team juggling the complicated logistics of shooting inside an open hotel. But when you watch, it seems to all be one big late-night fantasy, and at the end morning dawns on Rihanna as she stands atop the hotel roof, soaked in daylight and clapping.