Biography
Alexandre de Betak has been in the fashion industry for 25 years, producing runway shows, installations, events and exhibitions. With clients including Dior, Hussein Chalayan , Rodarte, Jason Wu , Viktor & Rolf, Michael Kors , Berluti and H&M among many others, he has offices Paris, New York and Shanghai. He produced Miu Miu’s first ever fashion show (in New York in 1994) and the live Victoria's Secret webcast that famously crashed the company’s website in 2000.
As a child, de Betak developed an interest in photography, telling BoF, “it all started for me when I was seven years old and my grandfather gave me an Instamatic camera, the little Kodak 127, and I started being very passionate about pictures.” The young de Betak knew he wanted to create precisely framed, memorable images, but he was too impatient to become a photographer.
De Betak produced his first fashion show at the age of 19, for the designer Sybilla Sorondo in Madrid. In 1990, de Betak opened his agency, Bureau Betak, in Paris. But his career really took off once he moved to New York in 1993.
“I proposed the antithesis of what people were used to seeing. I went in and tried to make [shows] very fast, very compact, very energetic and very minimal in the sense of how many messages you put into one.”
To date, Bureau Betak has produced and designed over 900 shows, exhibitions and events.