British choreographer Aaron Sillis has danced with Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and Rihanna, and is the go-to guru who creates fluid, cutting-edge moves for FKA twigs and Zayn Malik. It’s fair to say he’s elevating pop music video choreography to an art form. But there were no assigned steps—and no rules whatsoever—when Sillis showed up as “movement director” on the set of Vogue.com’s new Paris collection video, a spirited mash-up of models wearing the best of the Spring collections from Paris Fashion Week and young, hip Parisian dancers busting their freshest moves.
“We had no rehearsal time, so it was pretty much just vibing off one another,” Sillis said. The dancers played brand-new tracks ripped from SoundCloud, with a splash of Solange Knowles, making for “lots of group jam sessions in the courtyard of the studio. Everyone was just getting down with each other. There was loads of laughing. We just were pulling stuff out of the sky as quickly as we could,” explained Sillis.
Shedding his choreographer hat to “movement direct” is “a lot more free-flowing,” Sillis said. “You really get to collaborate with the models”—as well as their looks, pulled right from the runway, some that very morning. When one model told Sillis she wasn’t comfortable dancing, “I was like, ‘Look, we don’t need you to be a professional dancer. We need you to just feel free to move how you move,’” he said he told her. “‘I’m not looking for perfection. I'm looking for you to be the perfect version of yourself.’”
With that sense of freedom and fun, Sillis led what became a pop-up dance party through the streets of Paris, winding through alleyways and graffiti-lined plazas. For one model, it was “retro jazz moves, like flinging her head down and up and really embodying this dramatic woman from the ’60s or ’70s. We definitely went back in time for a little bit,” he said. For another duo, “we were working on really bossy walks: ‘You just need to feel like a million dollars in this outfit.’’’ When it came to the professional dancers, Sillis explored an eclectic mix of styles: “Some of them would be doing hip-hop. Some were krumping. We had a voguing girl,” he recalled. “We were literally guerrilla-style, going through the streets, taking them down the subway.” At one point, even deciding, “Hey, why don’t we just shoot in the convenience store?”
The result is a bright, colorful, and hopeful ode to the City of Light, which has struggled to regain its robust tourism in the wake of the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theater. It was poignant, Sillis said, shooting a scene at the Place de la République, which became a memorial filled with flowers and mementos in the wake of the attacks.
“It was a really great thing that we could all come together and use the language of dance as therapy,” he said. “It’s uplifting to see a bunch of people just dancing together and having fun and being free and not letting those things get them down. It’s like we’re still continuing. We’re going to power on.”
Watch the 19 Best Looks From Paris Fashion Week, on the Coolest Dancers in the City