Photo from Floating Landscape, directed and produced by Roku Long and team for designer Bonan Li, New York Fashion Week 2025.
Photo by Joey Wang
IMMERSIVE RUNWAY
Based in New York — a global center of fashion and creativity — Roku actively engages with the city’s vibrant network of designers and artists. Since 2023, she has been exploring the form of immersive runway production. Her first collaboration, Immersive Dream, was a prototype created with fashion designer Autumn Kietponglert at the Barnard Movement Lab. In 2024, the project was brought to the stage at Philadelphia Fashion Week.
In September 2025, during New York Fashion Week, Roku directed an immersive runway show for designer Bonan Li at The Blanc Gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Leading a team of over 60 collaborators, she crafted a live experience that blended vocal performance, music, and dance, presenting it to nearly 500 guests in New York.
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FLOATING LANDSCAPE
Directed by Roku Long, Floating Landscape premiered on September 16 at New York Fashion Week 2025, transforming The Blanc Gallery in Manhattan into a living, breathing ecosystem of fashion, movement, music, and space.
Rather than following the conventions of a runway show, the piece invited audiences into an immersive spatial performance where the boundaries between performer and spectator dissolved. The audience could walk, sit, or stand freely as dancers moved among them—guiding them through a sensorial dialogue between body, garment, and environment.
As director, Roku envisioned Floating Landscape not as a fashion presentation, but as a meditation on the relationship between the human body and nature. The work explored designer Bonan Li’s concept of “Body as Landscape,” rooted in Eastern philosophy—the idea that the body is the starting point of perception, and clothing becomes a medium through which humans reconnect with the natural world. Roku’s direction emphasized fluidity and presence, allowing movement, sound, and light to respond to one another in real time, transforming the gallery into a flowing terrain of human and elemental energy.
Through her lens, Floating Landscape became an experiment in emotional and spatial storytelling, merging choreography, fashion, and installation into one collective experience. The result was not a show to be watched, but a space to be felt—a moment suspended between stillness and motion, between the human and the natural, between art and life.