Bünyamin Aydın's Cappadocia fashion show, From Earth to Sky, was designed on iPad Pro and filmed on iPhone 18 Pro MaxBünyamin Aydın's Cappadocia fashion show, From Earth to Sky, was designed on iPad Pro and filmed on iPhone 18 Pro Max

Apple has published an account of From Earth to Sky, a fashion show by Les Benjamins designer Bünyamin Aydın, staged in Cappadocia and filmed on iPhone 18 Pro Max.

The show marks 15 years of Les Benjamins, the Istanbul label Aydın founded. Apple's Newsroom post of 14 October says the ten-look collection was designed largely on the M5 iPad Pro with Apple Pencil Pro, and that the runway in Rose Valley was set against three custom hot-air balloons in neon green, yellow and pink, built with the Cappadocia operator Pasha Balloons. A film of the show is due on Apple's Instagram account from 16 October.

What did Aydın use iPad Pro for?

According to Apple, the project began on a research trip to Cappadocia in early 2026, where Aydın recorded the terrain on an iPhone 17 Pro Max and drew on iPad Pro. Three native flowers set the palette: green Echinops, pink trumpet flowers and wild yellow tulips, paired with cream, blue and natural tones. Apple describes the clothes as contemporary silhouettes in Turkish fabrics with Silk Road influences, and the opening look as a caftan carrying a tree branch, a tribute to the Turkish rock musician Barış Manço.

Apple names four parts of the iPad workflow. Freeform held the mood boards of photos, fabric references and early designs that Aydın shared with his team. Procreate was where one balloon structure was duplicated and redrawn into dozens of variations before three were chosen. iPadOS windowing kept a sketch open beside travel photos and Safari research on local plants, and Background Tasks finished exports for collaborators while he kept drawing. Aydın calls the tablet "the ultimate workstation on the go", and credits Apple Pencil Pro's hover preview and low latency.

How was the show filmed on iPhone 18 Pro Max?

French director Neels Castillon shot the show on iPhone 18 Pro Max, Apple says. Filming started in low light and the 48MP Fusion Main camera's variable aperture was narrowed as the sun came up, with operators matching cameras through the histogram and white balance controls. Custom drones each carried two iPhone 18 Pro Max units, using the Ultra Wide camera to keep the balloons in frame, with a slower shutter turning fast passes into motion blur. Fabric was filmed in 4K at 120 frames per second for slow motion, in ProRes RAW to leave room for grading, and stills used the Texture and Grain controls in Photographic Styles. Castillon reviewed footage on location on a MacBook Pro with M4 Max.

Our take

This is Apple's showcase, written by Apple, and it should be read as one. It does not give the date of the show, the software the footage was graded in, the drones that carried the phones, or whether any other cameras were on set, and it says nothing about the clothes going on sale. Nobody outside Apple had reported on the show when we wrote this, so every detail above is Apple's account.

Within those limits, the camera half is the more instructive. When we reported Final Cut Camera gaining control of the four iPhone 18 Pro aperture stops, the obvious question was what a phone needs an iris for. A shoot that starts in near darkness and ends in full sun is the answer: closing the aperture keeps exposure in check without touching the shutter speed that the drone shots depend on for their blur. That is a stronger case than the low-light gain most reviewers of the iPhone 18 Pro Max cameras rated as modest. The stills tell the same story about Texture and Grain, which Apple has limited to the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo: Apple is putting the newest phone's exclusives in front of its showcase work.

The iPad half is less about the M5 iPad Pro, which is not new, than about iPadOS. Mood boards, windowed research beside a drawing and an export that keeps going in the background are ordinary on a Mac, and only recently ordinary on an iPad. The lesson APPDOOK takes for app makers is in the Background Tasks line. An export that dies when the user switches to another app is exactly the friction that keeps professionals at a desk, and continued background processing is now a system feature that any creative app can adopt. If your app exports large files, that is the work worth doing before the next showcase like this one lands.