Models walk along the basic runway at the River Tooth show. Photo: Yang Hui/GT

 Lights off, music on. In the darkened auditorium hundreds of cell phones are pointing toward the stage.

Lights on. A narrow runway is revealed bathed in lighting that makes the presentation area look like rocky mountain plateau with a door opening at the white-walled end. Immediately a man walks out of one of the doors, wearing a pair of jeans and a blue knitted overcoat over a brown sleeveless jacket wrapping inside a rugged grey shirt. As he walks along the colored lights fade before him and then for a few seconds the catwalk is unbelievably white.

The man's handsome face has been streaked with "dirt" and he runs to the other end of the runway before turning and strolling back then disappearing through the door in the white wall. This was how the Guangzhou-based menswear brand River Tooth opened its catwalk presentation at Xintiandi during the Shanghai Fashion Week (SFW) 2016 autumn/winter collections.

The curtain call

In the following 15 minutes, 33 models paraded 66 new outfits from River Tooth (though only three of the models were Chinese). Just offstage Ding Yong, the brand's chief designer stood looking at the show on a monitor and waiting for his own appearance at the curtain call.

Then it came. Lights off. Lights on. Ding walks onto the stage, steps forward the three steps he has been directed to, bows three times with a small smile, and retreats backstage again. The show is over.

While the audiences at SFW are happy and relaxed the people backstage are far from relaxed. The designers, models, technicians, dressers, makeup artists, lighting and sound crews and stage managers are hard at work making the catwalk shows look perfect.

To see how complex staging these 15-minute shows can be, the Global Times spent several hours with Ding as he prepared for his fashion house's show.

We met Ding at around 8 pm on April 9 backstage in Hall A by Taipinghu Lake in Xintiandi. This was for a rehearsal for the show before it had its official presentation on the following night at 7 pm.

During SFW, some 50 fashion houses are having runway shows at Xintiandi in either the larger Hall A or the smaller Hall B. Another 20 fashion houses presented shows and displays this year at the Jing'an 800 Show or at Rockbund's China Baptist Publication Building.

Ding was half an hour late because of traffic, but he looked rather relaxed. His team of six people had arrived earlier bringing the clothes for the show and working with the venue's production team from the Apax Group which is an official partner of SFW from 2014 to 2016 and provides the spaces and the technical aspects for the shows and displays.

Before the rehearsal, the two teams had worked out the details of the brand's show and arranged the space, finalized the models, lighting and sound, makeup and running order.

At Beijing Fashion Week two weeks previously River Tooth had presented a runway show and Ding wanted to bring that format to Shanghai but some elements had to be changed because of the shape and size of the Shanghai hall.

From Beijing to Shanghai

In Beijing, the show was presented in a large old factory and Ding, who is also a noted artist, designed an installation for it using 1,000 weaving shuttles alongside the catwalk. However the Shanghai space was too small to use the same installation, so Ding decided to use the basic empty runway letting the audience focus more on the clothes.

Amy Chan is the leader of the Apax team which has been working with 11 brands this year to stage their runway shows, and she agreed with Ding that it was better to try this natural and minimalist approach for his show.

Amy Chan is busy working at a rehearsal. Photo: Yang Hui/GT

"I love Ding's clothes so much - maybe it's because he has a painting background, but his designs resemble oil paintings in a way," Chan told the Global Times.

Ding said that his Shanghai show would be about 30 percent different from the Beijing presentation. "The presentations have to change with the models, because each model has his or her own personality and the clothes should fit their characters."

He was happier with the models in Shanghai than some of the Beijing performers - he thinks Shanghai has better model services. Chan had the models walk and move in a relaxed way to reflect the natural and free-flowing spirit of the brand.

The background music had been prepared by another team in early March, and featured gypsy style music with mellow singing by men and women. "The foreign models know pretty well how to move with this sort of music," Chan said.

It was about 9:30 pm when the rehearsal started - there had been another brand using the runway and the backstage for its show at 8 pm. For fashion week shows there are usually two rehearsals, the final one with the actual brand clothes.

That was when Ding was hard at work, checking not just the outfits but the makeup and a score of other details. It was well after midnight when Ding and his team got to pack up their clothes and leave Xintiandi.

"The designers are really stressed and we're also very stressed  - during SFW we barely find time to eat, we're so busy," Chan said.

A model forgets

On the night Chan was paying even closer attention to Ding's show than normal - in rehearsal one of the models had forgotten to change his outfit for the curtain call.

While the catwalk itself is a place of elegance and style backstage during a show is a scene of chaos. More than 20 women dressers help the models change and ensure that the outfits are put on the right way and in time for their appearances. On the night Ding's show ran smoothly and without a hitch.

But not all shows run smoothly and Chan and her team know how to improvise at a moment's notice. This year just before a show was to open, the intercom linking the lighting and sound control panel with the backstage crew failed and they had to use a cell phone to cue the entire show.

At another show while the designer created four new outfits at the last minute she forgot to include the new footwear. Chan's team solved the problem by rearranging the running list so that models could wear appropriate shoes with the new outfits.

This has been Chan's fifth SFW and her team has varied backgrounds - the person who takes care of the models for the shows manages a city model agency.

"She can remember just about every model's name once she has seen a face and she is really efficient at making sure the right models are in the right place at the right time. If I had to do her job I'd struggle to recall the names let alone spell them correctly or pronounce them properly," Chan said.

Over the past three years, Chan has been more open to try new production styles for different shows and she said she wanted to make each show distinctive because she enjoyed the process. "It's arduous, but it's a lot of fun."

Doing it with friends

Unlike Ding who has his brand team and Apax to help create the show there are also designers who have to do it all (or most of it) by themselves. Yang Yang, a fresh face in the fashion business, has no assistants and no professional production team - for her show at SFW she got help from her friends and former classmates from Saint Martin's University.

Ding Yong looks closely at the models during a rehearsal. Photo: Yang Hui/GT

At 8 pm on April 11, Yang Yang presented her first ever catwalk show at Rockbund with 15 outfits from her brand, The Lawn.

Far from the professionally produced and slick runway at Xintiandi, Yang Yang's show was staged in a very basic setting in a vacant building with concrete floors and walls and industrial piping visible.

Inspired by a trip to India, Yang Yang had created a rough street scene with thin plastic sheets and sponge pads. To highlight the more intense colors of her clothes, she had painted the scenery pink.

"I found all the material and paint and did this two weeks before the show," Yang told the Global Times.

She had decided to take part in SFW after being prodded by the Dong Liang Studio which specializes in high quality limited edition fashion.

Up to one month before the fashion week began Yang Yang had thought there would be a production team to help her with the show and all she would have to do was making the clothes.

So it was a serious setback when she learned she would have to do it all herself- as a young and new designer she could not afford a professional production team which can cost around 200,000 yuan ($30,860) for a show at Xintiandi.

So she asked her friends to rally around and spent about 15,000 yuan on the entire show. Originally she had wanted to have the audience seated on special plastic sponges but there were going to be too many at the show to have this happen.

Out of her nine models, only four were professionals - the others were friends. But she enjoyed the "mixed" and "casual" atmosphere this created. Backstage the crew and dressers were all friends.

In the end the show worked and was well received, even if at times there were little pauses between the models appearing.

"I never thought that my first show would be like this," Yang Yang said. "But I would like to give full marks to my friends who helped me finish the show."

After this show, Yang said she would take a year off before she joins the SFW again because she has little money to do shows, while River Tooth told the Global Times that it's looking forward to appearing again next season.