Case Study: Columbus Shopping Centre — How to Organise a Fashion Show with Tenant Integration

Columbus Shopping Centre had three objectives for the quarter: launch the spring-summer season, attract new customers to tenants, and integrate as many centre stores as possible into the project. A standard fashion show in a shopping centre does not solve this. Typically, it looks like this: a catwalk, professional models, sponsor brands, applause — and visitors disperse. Tenants get a line in a report; sales do not change.

The SICHKAR GROUP team proposed a different principle: build the show so that visitors in the audience recognised themselves in the models. Then, after the show, they would not just remember a beautiful image but would want the same clothes and go to a store on the same floor to buy them.

A shopping centre’s audience is not twenty-something glossy magazine models. It is families, children, women aged 35+, men of different ages, grandparents with grandchildren. If a show uses standard models, this audience watches it like a movie — beautiful, but not about them.

The team formulated the show’s idea as 'Fashion Without Templates': style can suit any age; you do not have to fit into conventional moulds. From this idea came the key decision: invite models aged 7 to 72. The catwalk featured children, teenagers, adults, couples and trios, and mature women.

This idea immediately solved several problems. First, visitors saw someone like themselves in the audience and automatically imagined the outfit on themselves. Second, the show appealed to the centre’s broad audience, not a narrow fashion crowd. Third, the story gained media potential — for social media, an older model in a contemporary look performs significantly better than yet another standard one.

The show was divided into three thematic blocks: 'Modern Classics', 'Connection with Nature', and 'Elevated Mood'. Each block organised spring-summer trends into its own logic, showing the audience that the same direction could be worn in three different ways.

The project’s lead stylist was Natalia Semenova, founder of the Bonomodo trend bureau and the Higher School of Image and Style. She worked in the reverse logic of a classical show.

First, the stylist visited the shopping centre and walked through the partner stores. For each of the three blocks, she selected items directly from the tenants' racks: jackets, dresses, suits, footwear, accessories. Only then, with a real wardrobe from partner collections in hand, did she begin to create looks for specific models of different ages.

This sequence produced two effects. First, each brand received not a token 'and we also have X' but a thoughtful integration of its assortment into an overarching story. Second, visitors saw not imaginary outfits but clothes they could buy in the same centre that day. No gap between the catwalk and the checkout.

In total, 13 tenant brands participated, with 66 looks created across three blocks for 22 models. Models were recruited through a specialised school, from ordinary people of different ages and body types.

To warm up the audience in advance, the team created a format that simultaneously served as an announcement and generated content for social media. One week before the show, on two different floors, a host would suddenly roll out a red carpet in the gallery over two days and invite random passers-by to walk it.

Everyone who agreed received a coloured card. The colour gave them a chance to participate later in an additional prize draw with a partner prize. All walks were filmed as short vertical videos.

Over the two days, more than a hundred people joined the activity. The videos went to the centre’s social media as a soft announcement of the show — not a poster with a date, but live faces of visitors who had already become part of the event.

The team brought in two media guests for the show: designer and stylist Ksenia Knyazeva and comedian Aleksandr Budarin. They were included not for celebrity photo opportunities but in a format that continued the show’s core idea.

Ksenia Knyazeva led a block called 'Fifteen-Minute Transformation': she selected women from the audience, styled them in new looks using clothes from tenant stores, and brought them back to the stage already transformed. The audience watched a familiar script from style TV shows, but live — with clothes they could buy immediately.

Aleksandr Budarin participated in the second interactive — 'New Looks for a Millennial' - where a stylist deconstructed his habitual style on stage and built new looks for him from partner collections. The format appealed to a young male audience, which typically comes to a shopping centre for a specific purchase and ignores events.

Both guests supported the project with posts on their social media. Their accounts have a combined following of over half a million subscribers, and the reach from their posts ran into hundreds of thousands of contacts.

The most interesting part of this project began after the venue emptied. Feedback from tenants in the days following the show all pointed in the same direction.

On the day of the show and the following day, visitors came to partner stores asking to find items they had seen on the catwalk — naming the block, describing the outfit, sometimes showing photos from social media. For three days after the event, the project’s stylists received direct messages asking for help finding specific pieces. This was not reach or clicks. It was real people walking into real stores for real clothes they had decided to buy because of the show.

Partner stylists also noted that they discovered new combinations for their collections and incorporated them into their store lookbooks.