On the 25th of January 2024, beneath the Pont Alexandre III in Paris, under the first full moon of the year and a sky that had been raining all night, models walked the Maison Margiela Artisanal show like figures from a beautiful dream that had curdled at the edges: doll-like, exhausted, cold.

Designer John Galliano had given his movement director, Polish-born Pat Boguslawski, the following brief: it’s 5am, it’s a full moon, it’s rainy, and they need to feel exhausted and cold. Boguslawski – who had spent years wondering why everybody in fashion walked like a mannequin – and who had been working with Galliano since 2018 – understood immediately.

Widely cited as the show of a generation by critics and fans alike, it was proof that movement direction could transmute even Galliano’s genius from fashion show into cultural phenomenon, the kind you could happily lose hours to, on repeat.

Boguslawski had given each model a character to inhabit: Leon Dame, topless and waist-cinched, clutching a glass of wine and leering at audience members as he moved through the crowd; a man shivering in the rain, hunched with cold; a woman in a trenchcoat made to look like wet cardboard; and Gwendoline Christie closing the show, wide-eyed and unsteady; “a broken doll,” as she herself described it.

Each model so deeply became their character that the clothes and the body became inseparable. People cried in the audience. They cried backstage. “When you see people crying watching this show or screaming and shouting, ‘We want more’ – that is something you’ll never forget,” Boguslawski said afterwards. A discipline three decades in the making had just entered the mainstream: movement direction.

To understand where the role came from, you have to rewind. The title had belonged to Stephen Galloway first. Tennessee-born, trained at William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt, later an art director at Issey Miyake and creative consultant to The Rolling Stones, Galloway had been shaping bodies in campaigns for Gucci, Calvin Klein and Valentino since the 90s, working in the space between departments that didn’t yet have a term for what he was.

He called himself a choreographer, because that was the closest available description, until he realised it didn’t quite fit. What he was doing was more psychological, more observational – less about what a body did and more about what it communicated. When he changed his title to Creative Movement Director, the response was immediate. “Within 24 hours,” he told Into The Gloss in 2015, “the clients went from being like, ‘We’re doing a hair commercial, why the fuck do we need a choreographer on set…?’ To… ‘We need to do this!’”

Fashion had spent decades perfecting the inanimate. What it was hungry for, it turned out, was life. By 2024, a churn of creative director changes across the major Houses – Dior, CHANEL, Gucci, Balenciaga, Loewe and more within the space of two years – had produced a parallel demand for new physical vocabularies, new ways for bodies to carry the weight of a new vision.

And audiences, raised on fashion as video content consumed on phones in the first two seconds before the algorithm moved on, had grown sensitive to the difference between a body that occupies an image and a body that inhabits one.

In the years since Galloway first changed his title to movement director, a new cohort has formed around the discipline. One of them is Jorge Dorsinville, who grew up in Salvador, Bahia, where his reference for fashion was the billboards on the streets.

He moved to New York as a dancer with a background in physical theatre, butoh and capoeira, and started picking up work on fashion sets – first as a production assistant, then gradually as the person photographers and stylists turned to when something wasn’t working and nobody could pinpoint why.

“I found myself in between departments,” he says. “Not fully choreography, not styling, not directing, but somehow speaking to all of them through the body.”

He has since worked with Vogue, Jean Paul Gaultier and Balmain, directed Robyn’s Sexistential performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – for which she wore Versace, and for which he built a choreography from the inside of the lyrics outward – and was recently announced as creative movement coordinator for the 2026 FIFA World Cup campaign.

The Robyn project is a useful window into how his mind works. “From the first listen,” he said of working with the artist, “the lyrics felt uncompromising, raw, funny, visceral, and deeply philosophical. They speak about the body as truth, about autonomy, pressure, desire, creation, fear, and choice. My work was not to decorate the song, but to translate its existential weight into the body. The choreography was built around contradiction: control and surrender, strength and vulnerability, stillness and push.”

His method is called BODYtelling. “The moment I’m always looking for,” he says, “is the moment when the person stops trying, and starts revealing.” In practice, this means working almost entirely through sensation and image.

He builds a library of gestures before each project – pulling from film, nature, architecture, music – translating references into physical fragments, collecting them like words. “Each gesture holds meaning,” he says, “and when you start placing them together, they form a language. But it’s not fixed, it’s alive. It evolves once I bring it to the talent.”

On set he might tell someone to “move like the fabric is carrying you,” or “let your body arrive before your face does.” He offers pieces of that language rather than full sentences, and their body does the rest.

“Unlocking is not about adding something to someone,” he says. “It’s about removing what’s in the way.” Most people arrive on set carrying layers – expectation, self-consciousness, the pressure to look right – and the first task is simply creating the conditions for those to drop. “It’s very human before it’s technical,” he says. “We’re discovering something together.”

Ryan Chappell spent years as a professional dancer and choreographer before a brief and clarifying detour through fashion design – including a formative stint under Phoebe Philo at CELINE – that gave him something most movement directors don’t have: a structural understanding of how clothes are made, and why that matters the moment a body has to live inside them.

He has since worked with Dior, Gucci, Hermès, Prada and Louis Vuitton, directed movement for Seán McGirr’s debut Alexander McQueen show, and worked on Marine Serre’s AW24 Café de Serre presentation.

He tries, wherever possible, to meet talent before hair and makeup, wanting to see the person before the image has been assembled around them. The role draws on everything simultaneously – an understanding of lighting, tailoring, brand history, taste, and the psychology of everyone in the room.

“You have to be a hypersensitive polymath in many ways,” he says. “You have to really understand and read people very easily. And you have to love people too, because it’s very much about people. You also have to really understand energies, how things change, and how you can bring things together. You’re almost like the glue or the magician trying to bring everything together.”

The value of all that is difficult to quantify, which is partly why the role took so long to be taken seriously. “There’s a lot of intangible things – that’s why people sometimes can’t see the value, because it’s not so black and white,” he says. “There’s a lot of stuff that you can’t put your finger on. And that’s why it happens, because the magic in making a picture, you can’t put your finger on that either.”

He works through adjectives and sensation rather than technical direction – telling someone to give him “an expensive shoulder” rather than showing them where to place it, bypassing the brain and going somewhere more instinctive.

Behind the spontaneity, he brings to set a depth of knowledge about clothes, light, and what a particular brand is trying to dream into existence in a particular season – which means when the unexpected moment arrives, he knows exactly what to do with it.

“The greatest pictures and the greatest images that I’ve been part of,” he says, “are always sometimes an absolute total mistake – something that happens and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is great, let’s go there.’ It’s something you can’t preempt.”

Chappell likens a good movement director to a butterfly. “You need to fly in for a second, do the right thing, and then fly out,” he says. “You have to know when to come in and out. That’s the reading the room part.”

The speed of the industry has made this more essential, not less – he was on a Dior job recently where the photographers never picked up a camera; everything destined to be screenshots from video footage. “It’s so quick now,” he says. “It’s crazy what they want.”

Some clients now book him before the photographer, which he takes as a form of validation, proof that the work speaks before he does.

People still assume the best movement director is the best dancer, that this is a job about how well you move. Chappell is direct about it. “I don’t care that you can dance well,” he says. “How can you stimulate someone else and make them move in a way that we can get a picture? Because I’m not shooting you. You could sit on a chair and just point your finger – and if you have this way to manipulate, in a really positive way, someone’s mindset and the way they move their body, then that’s the skillset.”

“For a long time, fashion was very much about perfection, control, and image. But now there’s a shift toward emotion, individuality, and humanity. Audiences can feel when something is real and when it’s not. And the body doesn’t lie.”

What drives him beyond the set is MOVEMENT+, a program he founded after watching the industry’s appetite for newness run headlong into its indifference to what that costs the people it consumes.

Models arrive fast, get swept into campaigns and exclusives, and are rarely given the psychological tools to navigate any of it. “And then all of a sudden they realise they’re at the top and they feel like a total phony,” he says. “Second season, they’ve disappeared... they’ve sold millions worth of product because of their face, but they haven’t been supported.”

Working with agencies like IMG, MOVEMENT+ gives models what the industry rarely does: a sense of themselves inside the work, before the work swallows them. You can’t get something human out of someone you haven’t treated as one – it’s the same principle at work on every set.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “all we have is the relations and the connections we have with one another. The rest of it is just a bit of fun.”

Among a discipline still largely shaped by men, Imre van Opstal is one of the few women working at its highest level. Dutch-born, trained at Codarts Rotterdam, a former principal dancer with Nederlands Dans Theater and Batsheva Dance Company under Ohad Naharin, she has built a choreographic practice alongside her brother and creative partner Marne that moves between the concert stage and the runway.

They have made work for Paris Opera Ballet, directed the EUSEXUA tour for FKA Twigs and the EYEYE tour for Lykke Li, and twice choreographed Dior under Maria Grazia Chiuri, most recently for Cruise 2026.

What she has found, moving between the stage and the set, is that the fundamental question is always the same. “My background is rooted in dance, particularly in the context of theatre,” she says. “That experience shaped how I think about bodies as narrative tools – not just executing movement, but carrying meaning, rhythm and tension over time.”

Fashion required her to learn compression, the distillation of what might unfold over an hour on stage into a single frame. A single breath held at the precise moment everything converges.

“Moving between these worlds has made me very aware of scale and time,” she says, “how to compress something that might usually develop over an hour into a few seconds or a single frame, while still retaining depth.”

Her approach to preparation reflects this. “For me, over-preparing can sometimes take away from being present,” she says. “It can close off the intuitive impulses that are often the most interesting. I try to leave space for things to enter and reveal themselves in the moment. It’s less about arriving with answers, and more about staying open – looking for possibilities and allowing the work to unfold from there.”

She is drawn to the liminal space; the body caught between what just happened and what is about to. “It’s about finding the point where the body isn’t static but suspended – where it holds a before and an after at the same time,” she says. “An image feels alive when it suggests continuation, when it carries an internal rhythm that extends beyond the frame.”

Working with Marne, their practice keeps returning to the same territory – what sits between nature and nurture, what is instinctive in us and what is learned or imposed – and how those layers coexist in the body.

“One of the most consistent themes is the human condition,” she says. “How we carry emotion in the body, how we relate to each other, and how we exist within systems, relationships, or environments that shape us in subtle ways. We are interested in how those layers coexist in the body, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict.”

“The body holds so much more than form or technique,” she continues. “It holds memory, pressure, emotion, and contradiction. And it’s in those in-between states that something most honest appears.”

“A sense of recognition,” she says, of what she is working toward. “Something subtle but physical – a feeling that resonates in the body rather than just intellectually. If someone senses something they can’t fully name, but it stays.”

What Galloway saw coming in 2015 – that fashion content would migrate to phones, that a campaign which once lived on a billboard would become a moving image consumed on a screen – has arrived.

The Margiela show was its most legible proof: a show that produced recreation and participation, that made people want to inhabit a feeling rather than merely consume an image. Fashion hadn’t done that in a long time.

As we accelerate toward generated imagery, Chappell’s description of his own work feels apt. “I always think I’m the antithesis of AI,” he says. “I’m trying to stimulate emotional intelligence in people.”

There is a photograph he keeps returning to: Kate Moss, fingers at her face, laughing to the camera. “You can feel that she’s laughing,” he says. “I love this image – even though it’s simple, it’s got layers to it. You look back at it again and again, rather than it being an image where someone just looks pretty.”

“People are craving truth,” Dorsinville says. “For a long time, fashion was very much about perfection, control, and image. But now there’s a shift toward emotion, individuality, and humanity. Audiences can feel when something is real and when it’s not. And the body doesn’t lie.”