Chanel - Prêt-à-porter Collection Winter 2010-2011

The flying fridge

For its latest fashion show, Chanel built an iceberg style runway in the Grand Palais in Paris. To prevent to iceberg from melting and flooding the place a giant fridge was built over the 240 tons of ice. Just before the show started the fridge was hoisted up in the air.

We furnished all necessary equipment and people (together with EML) for the fridge to take off. This year Chanel’s request was rather special. We had to lift a 50 x 13 metre construction up in the air so that only the arctic set and the models would be left on the ground. For this we delivered 14 0,5T Varistar hoists to lift the fridge and 10 0,5T zero speed lift champ hoists to lift the two 40 metre lighting trusses. Synchronisation of all hoists was a major challenge here, but thanks to our K2 motion control system all went flawless. As always we offered a complete motion control service, including calculating the strength of the trusses and the position of the hoists so that all the loads were perfectly divided in order to avoid overloads.”