A New Player on the Fashion Stage As another fashion season gets underway, the conversation about the relevancy of the runway show continues. Anna Kushnerova and Romain Brau, the duo behind RA, Antwerp's premiere fashion boutique/art gallery/book shop/restaurant, have a firm stance on the issue. "We find the format static and boring," says Brau. And to drive the point home, at RA's new Paris outpost, which opened on the Rue de la Corderie in the third arrondissement this week, designers who share their beef with the industry's standard method of presentation will get a chance to act on their frustrations - sometimes literally. Along with selling luxury fashion such as eveningwear from Serkan Cura and millinery by Nasir Mazhar - a switch from the Antwerp shop, which focuses on avant-garde labels like Siki Im and Bless - Kushnerova and Brau will provide alternatives to formulaic runway shows in the form of theatrically-inspired fashion happenings. "When we started in Antwerp, the idea was to create a comfortable personal space for ourselves and our community," says Kushnerova, who along with Brau was a fashion design student at Antwerp's Royal Academy before embarking on a career in retail. With this, we have a more precise vision - we want to really explore the idea of production-based fashion exhibits with music and scenery. The pair worked with stage and lighting designers, including a scene painter from the Brussels Opera, to create the shop's dramatic interior, which references the art and décor of the 1920s and "30s. The first designer to tread the boards, so to speak, at RA's fashion theater was the Belgian-born Cura, who has worked for the corset maker Mr. Pearl and the designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, and played with the idea of backstage and onstage. "Part of the collection was shown on dolls," says Brau. RA, 14 Rue de la Corderie, 75003 Paris