Fresh off the back of capturing Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, director Sam Wrench has returned to oversee the livestream for Vogue World’s fabulous third instalment in Paris. Ahead of Sunday night, Vogue caught up with the Grammy nominee and Emmy winner about bringing the event to life on screens around the world.
Sam Wrench—the mastermind behind the Vogue World: Paris livestream—settled on a career as a director before he’d even reached his teens. “I’d go into edits [with my father, who’s also in film] a lot growing up, which is kind of weird in hindsight,” the now 33-year-old says with a laugh a few days out from Vogue’s Place Vendôme takeover. “If someone brought their kid around when we were working now, I’d be like, huh, but it was just accepted back then.”
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A childhood spent watching the making of “Red Hot Chili Peppers Live At Slane Castle on DVD” and its ilk was enough to convince him to leave school before A-levels to pursue a career in television. He quickly landed a job at Channel 4, making “little documentaries about bands” for the 15-minute “Four Play” slot just after midnight. “It’s through that that I met a lot of artists, interacted with a lot of labels—and people in music are really, really loyal. So many of the teams that I work with now are the same ones that I worked with at 22.” Another key learning experience during his formative years in the industry? Acting as a PA-stroke-runner for the director Hamish Hamilton, who’s overseen everything from the Super Bowl to the Academy Awards through the years. “I would be running and fetching teas and coffees and then sitting behind him, watching and learning. Having the ability to shadow someone like that—it’s transformative when you’re just starting out.”
By the mid-2010s, he had graduated to working on longer form content: directing Blur: New World Towers; filming Mary J Blige for The London Sessions; and orchestrating the creation of Mumford & Sons: We Wrote This Yesterday, before launching into the country world with two concert films in the 2020s (Blake Shelton, Kane Brown). That, in turn, led to his collaborations with some of the most obsessed-over names in pop; it’s Wrench who oversaw the hysteria-inducing BTS: Permission to Dance on Stage – LA in 2022, followed by Billie Eilish Live at the O2 in 2023. And this year? He turned his attention to shooting Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour at SoFi Stadium. It was, he says, an “amazing” experience, “not just because she’s at the top of her game, but because she’s a consummate professional and also has a director’s mind—she just gets it.” “No one really knew we were working on it, and then when the trailer came out, the response made us realize, okay, this is going to be bigger than anything we’ve done before. We just kept our heads down during edits, though; the goal was always to balance the scale of a production like that with a feeling of intimacy, which, again, is something that Taylor really understood the importance of.”
In between shaping the future of music, films, and music films, Wrench has also steered the livestreams for Vogue World three years in a row at this point, capturing a street fair in the Meatpacking District in 2022, an opening night in the West End at Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 2023, and now a fashion spectacle on Place Vendôme that marries trends from every decade with a different sport. “That first year, nobody really had an idea of what to expect, and the weather was pretty crazy,” he recalls. “Now, we’re in our third year, and Vogue World feels like it’s more established. London was amazing, but I have to say, I’m even more excited about Paris.” Not that filming in a major thoroughfare in the 1er arrondissement on the eve of Couture Week is straightforward. “The challenge is really the enormous size of Place Vendôme, and the fact that there’s a giant column in the middle of it. We’ve got about 13 cameras spread out across it to travel around with the models and talent. The sense of movement is really important, especially in terms of Parris [Goebel]’s choreography.”
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