Gareth Pugh (Q4111)
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Gareth Pugh is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Gareth Pugh |
Gareth Pugh is a fashion house from FMD. |
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2006
creative director
worked at
Gareth Pugh is hosting a vogueing ball tonight in honor of his friend and mentor, the legendary stylist Judy Blame, who passed away in February. Pugh’s Spring show, which took place earlier in the evening, paid homage to what the designer described in his show notes as “outsider society . . . London as a cradle of creative extremism.” Pugh enlisted the help of choreographer Benjamin Milan, one of the most renowned voguers on the U.K. scene (to give a sense of his caliber, he’s worked with the likes of Madonna and FKA twigs). There was even a reference to the ballroom scene “house mother,” the matriarch figure who nurtures the youngest members of a house, with a model who appeared to be heavily pregnant clad in a skintight bodysuit and billowing maternity skirt.The dancers prowled the runway wearing dramatic masks, bodysuits, and disc-shaped headpieces that called to mind the theatrics of nightlife legend Leigh Bowery, and were covered in a red-and-black archive motif from Pugh’s graduate collection.The designer ditched the death-defying heels of seasons past for club-kid-ready stompers. The suiting in the collection seemed primed for the dance floor, too—pin-striped blazers with wide power shoulders and cheeky chaps-style trousers: executive realness rendered with Pugh’s trademark subversive edge. The bondage element to the collection was a familiar Pugh trope as well, and would have been right at home at The Two Skin Club, the cult fetish night spot of the 1980s where progressive sexual attitudes and inclusivity were the dominant culture.With that in mind, the most forward-thinking aspect of tonight’s show was quite possibly the casting. Unlike New York, London Fashion Week has held onto surprisingly conservative attitudes when it comes to diversity, and Pugh’s gender-fluid lineup broke that mold. It was a fitting tribute to boundary-pushing style.
15 September 2018
According to the liner notes for Gareth Pugh’s Fall show, the new collection was designed “for women who accept zero bullshit.” He isn’t the first to chase a fierce muse this season—designers on both sides of the pond have been trying to wrap their minds around what power dressing means in the age of #MeToo. Pugh chose to mine the destructive fury of Michael Landy’sBreak Down(2001), a landmark performance piece in which the artist gathered all his worldly belongings and systematically destroyed them over the course of two weeks.Models stomped down the runway wearing slick black demolition hammer-style gloves like something out of a Marvel comic book. Leopard-print jackets came with inflated shoulders and a tiny belted waist, a silhouette that fell somewhere between an agile feline and a ripped superhero. Those exaggerated proportions continued through to the super-high-waisted trousers that elongated the body with the help of Pugh’s tall platform shoes. The most extreme version of that footwear had the illusion of slouchy leggings, extending over the knee and grazing the upper thigh. In fact it seemed like you might need super powers just to get into a pair to begin with. Modeled to look like the body of a sports car, the flocked plastic corsets and dresses had the uniform appearance of highly stylized body casts. Indeed it was difficult to imagine how a woman might sit comfortably in some of the looks, let alone bring down the patriarchy. As technically brilliant as the collection was in places—the bed-of-nails corsetry was simply awe-inspiring—that futurist, woman-as-machine vision felt oddly retrograde even within Pugh’s fantasy fashion lexicon. Surely these days, harnessing your inner goddess starts by feeling good in one’s own skin.
17 February 2018
You can add Gareth Pugh to the lengthening list of designers taking a pass on a fashion show. In lieu of a catwalk, Pugh decided to make a short film expressive of his latest collection. Working with storied photographer Nick Knight as director, choreographer Wayne McGregor, and artist Olivier de Sagazan, among a host of collaborators, Pugh debuted hispièce du cinémaon what is—apparently—the largest screen in Europe. Pugh’s screening this afternoon was preceded by a bit of live theater: Animal rights activists lined the walkway into the show, shouting “shame on you!” at attendees as they entered. As it turned out, the sturm und drang was a fitting aperitif for the drama that followed. Pugh’s film was a hair-raiser, in ways both lurid and sublime.Whatever you make of his clothes from a practical wardrobe perspective, Pugh has always been a creator of indelible images and a strong storyteller with his fashion. It’s not hard to imagine him following in the footsteps of Tom Ford and the Mulleavy sisters in developing a career, or side-career, in film. Hollywood would be lucky to have him, and as for Knight: Your humble reviewer can’t recall the last time she witnessed a scene as properly primal and ghastly as the one here where Knight, on camera, reached into the clay belly sculpted on Pugh’s torso and pulled out what looked like . . . a hair baby?Eugh. And on the other hand, yours truly can recall very few instances of a garment coming as fully alive as Pugh’s fire-print dresses did in a sequence where they were worn by a troupe of gyrating dancers. Limbs appeared to emerge from an inferno, first devoured then revived by purifying flame.This was a collection born in fire. Pugh seemed to be establishing his own creation myth here, demonstrating, via allegory, the tortured process of how his avant-garde looks come to be made. That would be a mortifyingly pretentious project were it not for the fact that Pugh’s collection, in transcendent instances, earned that pretension. It wasn’t his cage-like constructions that did it, impressive as they were from a craft perspective, or his sculptural coats, or column gowns. No, what was extraordinary here were Pugh’s crinkled metallic looks: A red cowl-collared jumpsuit, baggy in the leg and nipped at the waist, for example, did the nowadays vanishingly rare thing in fashion of positing a vision of style’s future. These and similar looks weren’t riffing on a current trend or paying homage to a bygone aesthetic.
They were asserting something new—and better yet, a new thing that invited you in with its realism, even as it challenged your eye to adjust to what it hadn’t seen before. How does a designer—or any creative person, really—give birth to a new reality? That was the story Pugh’s film attempted to tell. In its highlight moments, this collection made you believe that Pugh was a man who could tell it.
16 September 2017
Gareth Pughwas not pulling any punches at his show tonight. Attendees trotted down five flights of rickety stairs to enter the cavernous unfinished basement of a building in Islington; for all the light and phone service down there, it may as well have been a bomb shelter or a black site. The music was a discordant mash-up of song samples handpicked by Pugh, mixed together according to the same principles the CIA uses to deprive prisoners of sleep. As Pugh’s show notes explained, he was demanding that his audience stay awake, “in the hope that [they] might Stay Woke.” This collection was about politics, in other words.It really was, though. Some may have found this dour, nearly all-black show a shade melodramatic. But in his envisioning of a dystopia that felt disturbingly near-at-hand, Pugh demonstrated a genuine understanding of this moment’s political stakes. He was attempting to elucidate the lived reality of Western society that routinely spies on its citizens, rounds them up, ships them away, or does violence to their bodies for the crime of being somehow, arbitrarily, Other. To this reviewer, at least, Pugh’scollection felt, finally, properly savage.Which is not to say that it was a through-and-through success. The armor-like tube constructions were silly, the references toCabaretandThe Night Portereasy and overt, and although Pugh’s feathery faux fur was appealing in limited doses, when ballooned to extravagant proportions it came off a bit costumey—as in,Game of Thrones. But those quibbles were more than made up for by the desolate beauty of Pugh’s garbage-bag-like garments, in particular those that billowed in back like parachutes as the models circled the extensive catwalk. Many of those models were friends of Pugh, people he described as “activists, artists, and outliers.” Seeing one of them—veiled in black plastic, cane in hand—make her way slowly around the room sent a chill of warning up your spine. Winter really is coming.
18 February 2017
Gareth Pughhas been busy. The night before his show, the operaEliogabaloopened at the Palais Garnier, in Paris, with 60 costumes designed by Pugh. Inevitably, Pugh's work for the opera wound up informing his new collection—both in terms of its theme and in its unapologetic theatricality. Written by Francesco Cavalli in 1667,Eliogabalois rather obscure; it centers on a tyrannical child emperor in Rome who anointed himself a sun god. The story struck Pugh as (cough, Trump) timely.There's really no beating a Gareth Pugh show for sheer showmanship. He uses all the devices at his disposal to drive home a message—and this season, he accelerated hard into that impulse, sending out numerous looks in bullion-like gold that more or less treated the body as a stage on which he could erect fabulist sets. These heavily decorated ensembles eventually gave way, however, to a collection notable for its atypical earthiness. There was something rather matter-of-fact about Pugh's breezy pieces in black, white, or purple silk—it wasn't a stretch, for instance, to imagine a Hollywood star treading a red carpet in his one-shoulder white gown (Angelina Jolie, maybe? It had the right Pallas Athena vibe for her). But it was the striped and sunburst-patterned looks in linen that really took the Pugh aesthetic somewhere new. His broad sundresses, caftans, and obi-belted looks struck an entirely original tone: The models came across like the chicest ayahuasca shamans ever. Which, unintentionally or not, hearkened back to this show's political subtext.
17 September 2016
Gareth Pughput on quite a show tonight. Taking over the grandiose Freemasons' Hall in Covent Garden, he sat much of the audience proscenium-style, and preceded hisdéfiléwith a commanding walk down the runway by Marie-Agnès Gillot, a star ballerina of the Paris Opera Ballet, who then presided over the presentation of clothes from a throne onstage, two male attendants at her side. Meanwhile, a voice on the soundtrack growled, “I’m a man-eating machine.” To drive the point home, some of the models in this show wore Hannibal Lecter hockey masks.Many designers have taken on the theme of female power. Pugh was reckoning with female authority, which is something else. Women have always exercised various forms of power, but asserting a claim to be in charge—to wear the pants, as it were—is something else, and Pugh did well to address himself to the theme. Pugh’s pants were flared, and came topped by fitted jackets with shoulders like daggers. One version of the look was royal blue and star-spangled, which stage-winked at the one particular woman asserting a claim to be in charge who likely inspired this collection. Pugh wouldn’t admit it outright, but if there’s a fashion god in this world, whenHillary Clintonwins the 2016 election she’ll wear Pugh’s immaculately tailored flag suit to her inauguration.No doubt about it, these were great-looking clothes. Pugh was leaning on the same silhouettes he offered in his game-changing show forSpring, which is no bad thing, and he elaborated attenuated flares and taut sheaths with wrapped pencil skirts, top-notch camel capes and coats, and nipped-waists suit jackets either blouson or tailored-to-a-T. Pugh also produced some of the best shearling outerwear yet seen in this shearling-heavy season: The belted coats were winners, to be sure, and Pugh is going to sell approximately a quadrillion of his snug, shearling-lined leather motorcycle jackets. Pugh is clearly staking a claim on fashion major-ness, putting his days as an experimental young gun behind him and entering the capitalist fray.A question lingered, though, at the close of this show. Did Pugh really do justice to his interesting theme? This collection had an unapologetic ’80s look—imagine Sigourney Weaver if Helmut Newton had directedWorking Girl—while the materials, like the camel cashmere and the Prince of Wales check, ticked the boxes of masculine business wear.
There was something a little un-radical in Pugh’s choice to address the topic of female authority via these motifs. That didn’t diminish the collection’s appeal, on a garment-by-garment basis, but neither did it change the terms of the debate. This was a show about how women claim authority in a man’s world. Next time, how about a show imagining a woman’s world?
21 February 2016
“You’re so money.” Recall, if you will, that unforgettable line fromSwingers, delivered in the midst of a pep talk at a nightclub. Money is the primary way we denote value in our society. “You’re so money” meansyou have so much value.You are so very good.Gareth Pugh’s latest collection was so, so money. Literally, in that there were actual pence coins sewn onto the clothes—a gesture that, in a different collection, you’d be tempted to read as a statement about luxury, or something along those lines. But Pugh’s money wasn’t raising questions. It was proposing a solution: Go out. Goballsout. Dress to the nines, as though everything this world has to offer belongs to you, because it does. You can buy whatever you want with the currency that is you. Be extravagant with yourself, and for god’s sake,have fun.The high spirits of this collection, meanwhile, raised a question: What on earth got into Gareth Pugh this season? Heading backstage after this exuberant, brilliantly styled show, you half-expected to find Pugh bouncing off walls and singing the praises of a new cocktail of serotonin reuptake inhibitors or, better yet, a new love. The truth was rather more prosaic. Pugh was up to some point-making here: We each contain multitudes, was his message, and reputedly dour Gareth Pugh is perfectly capable of putting his well-developed design muscles to work in the creation of a collection with a disco mood, just as the Gothic Gareth Pugh babes he’s cultivated see fit, once in a while, to slough off their cares and paint the town red.Red was Pugh’s signature color this season. The color pulsed through numerous looks, from the impeccably tailored silk faille suits, with their flared, attenuated silhouettes, to the paillette-covered short-shorts made for shimmying. The paillettes made perhaps their most stunning appearance in a trim black trench coat—the way the sequins dappled about the coat’s chest and shoulders suggested the movement of strobe lights dancing over pitch-colored clothes. The nightclub atmospherics extended into Halston-esque draped dresses and looks in a black-and-white diamond patterned jacquard that conjured the undying incandescence of club deity Leigh Bowery. The nightclub energy was present, too, in Pugh’s excellent, Mongolian fur–trimmed plastic jackets, with their frisson of sexual possibility (and perversity). The overall effect was magnificently louche.
Pugh clearly knew he’d be shocking the audience by sending out a collection premised on the pleasure principle. Did he know he’d be showing them perhaps his best collection ever? He probably knew that, too. Pugh should engage his gaudy side more often—here he demonstrated that his rigor as a craftsman can turn pretty much any look into pure class. His artistry is so money. And Pugh has more where that came from: He can afford to spend freely.
19 September 2015
Nothing of real value comes to us without real sacrifice. That primal notion was buzzing in Gareth Pugh's head as he prepared the collection that marked his return to London after seven years showing elsewhere. Following his show, Pugh talked about his fascination with "the idea of sacrificing yourself to something bigger than you are." Given the bleak, dramatic, ritualistic nature of his presentation, the conjecture was irresistible: Was he talking about his relationship with fashion itself? That has, after all, been somewhat conflicted of late. But no, he insisted the collection was optimistic, "part of something meaningful, being part of the game."In this case, the game meant not just fashion but an actual game, football, the most tribal ritual in British society. Coming home for Pugh induced a surge of nationalistic pride. His show began with a film by longtime collaborator Ruth Hogben, model Aymeline Valade (OK, she's French, but she served her fierce purpose to a tee) slicing her long blond hair into a warrior crop, daubing her face and body with red in a crude St. George's Cross. Just like Boudicca, the female warrior archetype, except she used blue woad. Red for Pugh meant love, war—and England. The models walked with faces painted in a red cross like football fans by Alex Box, their hair pulled back into a horse's tail by Anthony Turner. Pugh gave them clothes that were scaled up for impact, and protection: black capes, face-framing funnel necks, a jacket and skirt that were as voluminous as a wrapped duvet, a Mongolian lamb coat in a silhouette-warping shag, flaring dresses that swept the floor. Their dark, grandiose volumes suggested magnificence for a lost cause: something One of the Other Four Nominees might wear to the Oscars. They were as stiff and unyielding as Pugh's black leather breastplates.But there was also the kitchen-sink drollness (another intrinsically English quality) that has, in the past, seen Pugh turn garbage bags into ball gowns. Here, he used drinking straws to create intimidating, thorny carapaces. Picture fashion's middle point between Shakespeare and Clive Barker. That was kind of where Pugh started 10 years ago, and this collection was his way of going back there, giving himself, as he said, "a kick in the backside." And not just himself—when his bare-breasted warrior queen stormed down the catwalk at show's end brandishing a huge red flag, it was fashion itself that got a bit of a boot, too.
21 February 2015
Today is the day Gareth Pugh would normally be showing in Paris. Instead, he staged that enormous "immersive presentation" in New York, so Paris had to make do with some one-on-ones in the showroom. Actually, it worked out really well, because today was the autumn equinox, and Pugh's collection was fully informed by the pagan rituals attached to such calendar watersheds. Although in this case, it was obviously the rites of spring he had in mind. "I've had 10 years of doing this, and my last season in Paris I hit the reset button," said Pugh. "It felt like the end of something signaling the beginning of something else. That's why the phoenix is in the film." (That film, along with the others made for New York, can be viewed on Style.com.)"I wanted it of the earth, rather than landed from a spaceship," he continued, in tacit acknowledgment of the fact that his clothes often remind people of something extraterrestrial. So there were corn dolly hats, and steer skulls made from papier-mâché, and a playsuit fashioned after Scottish Burrymen, who would be ritualistically covered with thistles and other sticky things (here, the "thistles" were little flowers of chiffon, arduously attached by hand). There was also a huge round circle, like a satellite dish covered with hand-ripped rags of chiffon, that echoed a folkloric outfit known as the Padstow Obby Oss. There was a proper scarecrow made from sackcloth, too. Pugh worked with Simon Costin, from the Museum of British Folklore, to get everything right.But he cleverly transmuted those obvious showpieces into actual clothes. Handkerchief-hem dresses composed of chiffon rags in white had a virginal purity that seemed destined for the May queen. The sackcloth was cut into the same silhouette. "It hangs like silk gazar," Pugh enthused. "I love the inexpensive looking luxurious.""Frayed luxury," he called it. Well executed, but a bit haphazard. It was a new way to view Pugh. He liked the fact that the black and white geometries that are a signature fabric for him felt like they'd been made on a loom, with a bit of a slub. The same pattern was duplicated in the silk chiffon of a bias-cut goddess gown, as a reminder that Pugh knows exactly what he is doing.
His precision as a designer may have been most obvious in the way he took the big leather pentagrams he'd had made (rustic paganism gone truly occult) and turned them into sensational harnesses, the kind of item that would add sinister spine to any old piece of tat you chose to wear.
23 September 2014
Today's intriguing Gareth Pugh collection sent you searching for a raison d'être. Surely there must be a unifying theme to account for the mirror looks…and the ones made from great draped swaths of plastic construction sheeting…and those that were insanely soigné, in almost a New Look kind of way, and created out of some scrunchy white material that from a distance resembled curly lamb's wool. Not to mention the disco-ball effect of square plastic paillettes, and the squared-off construction of sculptural sleeves, and the twisted trouser-boot hybrids, and—can't forget—the animal pelts, and the clear shell covering on looks in neutral tones of cream and sand. You searched for some kind of key—a metaphorical one to match the literal one that was affixed to the back of a couple of looks—to define all this fashion, much of which was high-impact memorable. And if you came up empty-handed, maybe that's OK, because after his show tonight Pugh pretty much copped to the fact that there wasn't necessarily a statement here. According to the designer, he was being "intuitive" this season and seeing where that got him. Fair enough. In the end, it got him a collection made up of moments and parts. A sharp belted coat in beige here, a dress and cape made of pelts there. The latter was among the looks that pointed at a possible theme: You could imagine this being the very pith of chic in some postapocalyptic world, women scavenging glamour from plastic sheeting, animal skins, and whatever else was left lying around. Considered from that angle, this Gareth Pugh show had a real sense of optimism.
25 February 2014
A blush-pink feather headdress? A sliver of bias-cut silk slip—with a train? In turquoise? "That's teal!" corrected the designer, Gareth Pugh, laughing. But really, it was closer to turquoise, with nail varnish on the models to match. The most un-Gareth Pugh color ever was utilized here, to startling effect, in the opening look of the show: a twisted combination of showgirl, drag queen, and the Pugh we know.This was a collection to confound expectations of the designer—and purposefully so. "We sometimes have the tendency to rein things in," said Pugh after his show. "With this collection, I wanted to go against that. It's that idea that if you're pleasing everyone, you're doing something wrong! Sometimes you're trapped in the expectations of what other people think of you." Professing the influence of Gloria Swanson inSunset Boulevardand Julianne Moore inSafe—"I wanted the collection to be immaculate but hysteric somehow"—Pugh was certainly looking in the right place. The exaggerated makeup, designed for the early days of the silver screen, was combined with the wipe-clean world ofSafe,the latter hinted at with the stylized/sterilized molded-plastic garments. This was something of a deluxe cabin-fever collection, of people going nuts on estates in Southern California. There were new elements combined with the codes of the old Pugh; the designer had originally made his name with plastic garments with "architectonic" constructions, and in recent collections he has moved to something more romantic, with his linear constructions somehow softened. Here the defined linearity was back; the cuts were crisp, the silhouettes stiffened; there was a debt to traditional Japanese clothing. But a notion also emerged of purposeful, cartoonish "glamour" and of a playful suburban feel of "swimming pools and chlorine. I really wanted the audience to wade through a footbath before taking their seats," said Pugh. Although that would have ruined everyone's shoes, of course.There was something mischievous, something badly behaved about this collection. Lindsey Wixson made an appearance on the catwalk—a very un-Pugh model, usually—and she brought to mind the blow-up doll from Roxy Music's "In Every Dream Home a Heartache." This collection might not have had the immediacy and outright power of Pugh's last, but that's probably inevitable when the designer's rebelling against himself—the finale song was Queen's "I Want to Break Free.
" Sometimes it's necessary to do that; a transition in order to gather a new sense of self. Paris could just be the place where designers, in general, rebel this season—and it needs to happen for fashion to move forward. Pugh's collection might well herald a new mood.
24 September 2013
The omens were good at the Gareth Pugh show this evening, in the ornate salons of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild. To begin with, Cher was in attendance, causing something of a furor among the press. It seemed that the oft-reinvented singer was something of a lucky black cat for Pugh, as the London-based designer produced a great show that married some of the old Gareth with the new Pugh of last season.Pugh's linear, graphic style—you can have any color as long as it's black, white, or gray—was back. Yet it was coupled with that slightly softer romanticism of last season; there was a prolonged section of deep blue in this collection, something not seen before from the designer, as well as an enveloping sense of forceful femininity. As the show began, Pugh's structured, rigid silhouettes were mixed with a late-Victorian, floor-sweeping sensibility that brought to mind a Wilkie Collins set piece. A stiff, stark, floor-length funnel-necked dress was softened somewhat by gold embroidery of branches around its edges. Yet, as the woman in white was gradually replaced by the woman in black, any thoughts of ethereality were swiftly banished, especially as the model Marie Piovesan came down the runway playing a forceful role."We had found this information about a tribe of women called the Asgarda," Pugh said after his show. "They're amazing and inspiring. They want autonomy from men, and they live in the Carpathian Mountains." The influence of this contemporary band of extremely tough women, who take their cues from the Amazons, filtered into the collection, knocking any notions of mere costume drama out of it. "It is about both fight and flight this time," said Pugh. The standout looks were based on simple T-shirt shapes with full-length skirts, which had an ease about them that was new for the designer. They were a direct reference to the Asgarda, but also an artful nod to mid-century couture, marrying a new and an old sensibility for Pugh that suits him well.In Pugh's metamorphosis last season, you couldn't help but miss a little of that giddy London fun of his earlier shows and collections. Today it was back, on an ultra-bratty but ultra-sophisticated level, in his tour de force use of garbage bags. Never has a trash bag been put to more dramatic and romantic use than in this collection's finale looks.
Specially chosen for their very cheapness—the texture was almost raffialike—they were carefully crafted, woven into astonishing dresses that had an extravagant feel of topiary. "There isn't a bin bag left in E8!" laughed Pugh. These particular ones were selected from the Dalston one-pound shop near his studio in London. Trash transformed into treasure.
27 February 2013
Today, in his fourth year on the Paris catwalk, it felt like London-based designer Gareth Pugh completed his metamorphosis into a fully fledged, top-flight European designer. His linear graphic style—you can have any color as long as it's black, white, or gray—was given a softer, more deeply romantic edge than usual, and featured an extended shock of scarlet amongst his more characteristic color palette.But let's not get too soppy too soon. Thatprofondo rossomoment was more blood-red than be-my-valentine, and the collection's long, trailing trouser hems and extended, trainlike sleeves actually owed a debt to cockfighting. "The process and the preening of the birds is kind of like women going to a spa," observed Pugh backstage after his show. The trailing tendrils of material turned out to be the replacement for carefully groomed feathers, and the metal-spike-heeled shoes were stand-ins for the claw at the back of a fighting cock's leg. There was also a debt to the beauty and violence of flamenco—witness the giant mantilla headdress of the opening look, and the Spanish version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" fromMulholland Driveas the main soundtrack for the show. And then, of course, there was the fast-becoming-ubiquitous Japonisme—although it's a familiar trope from the designer's earlier work.There was a feeling of the surreal to this show, in terms of the old-fashioned René Magritte sense, and there were those same kind of veils worn: It's what Breton might have referred to as "convulsive beauty." The collection also made perfect sense on the most mundane of levels—those Edwardian-style button-backed blouses could easily sell and sell, and Pugh's production standards are second to none. Yet in Gareth Pugh's metamorphosis, you can't help but miss a little of the giddy London fun of his earlier shows and collections. But that may be part of the nature of Paris itself—the big stage where you fully embrace the pact with the dream of fashion. It's not to be taken lightly, and today it seemed like Pugh had made the pledge.
25 September 2012
Something about Gareth Pugh brings out the philosopher in his collaborators. Soundsmith Matthew Stone was talking about "the archetypal human need for religion." Makeup artist Alex Box was brooding on the penitence of nuns. Pugh himself shied away from anything directly tied to the dinner party's favorite conversation killer, but maybe that's because he felt his designs had done the talking for him. The fiercesome insularity of his clothes suggested a world where women had dispensed with the fripperies of civilization—i.e., men—in favor of a faith in female power. Nothing as blandly noxious as girl power, mind you. More a kind of cannibalistic, Amazonian, mutant force. And that sure made for a great fashion show.Petals of black had scarcely stopped cascading from the ceiling when Joan Smalls marched onto the catwalk in a yeti shag and Aztec headdress, like the high priestess of a techno death cult. Furriness and fringing in multiple variations followed, creating a liquid, indefinable silhouette. When Pugh drew that silhouette back to the body, he used snakeskin on a jersey backing, a sinuously elemental effect which automatically evoked the poor misbegotten serpent who tried to wise up Adam and Eve to their state of unblissful ignorance in Eden. But if Eve took the rap for Adam's fall, Pugh was determined to restore some semblance of her dignity. His women were battlefield-worthy in their funnel necks and spiked shoulders. And their enemy? Could it be God Himself, textured through Stone's soundtrack by Twitter voices saying His name? The conceit was an audacious one, but it's hard to ignore the niggle that Pugh needs something bold at this point in his career to knock him up to the next level. Alien beauty has a shelf life, after all.
28 February 2012
The planets aligned for Gareth Pugh tonight. He got to show his clothes just the way he'd always wanted—with his longtime collaborators Matthew Stone and Ruth Hogben providing, respectively, brilliant sound and vision to enhance his collection. Maybe that's why the show itself was more upbeat than anything this designer's ever done. In fact, it was positively happy, which sounds like a weird thing to say about a presentation that began with the image of a model in agonized isolation on the screen at the back of the catwalk. But—more to the point—it ended in fiery triumph, with Pugh's glistening, masked insectoid hybrid stalking down the runway and assuming her rightful place as empress of the universe. She'd shed her humanity to find her power. OK, that's a conceptual bridge the average boutique browser may find hard to cross, and maybe it just comes to mind because Hollywood's tom-toms are already throbbing on behalf of next year's last-woman-standing spectacularThe Hunger Games, but Pugh's models definitely looked weaponized, like sci-fi birds of prey. This was the dynamic, fearless apotheosis of his woman, so much so that the male models paraded by the designer looked like her next meal.In a sense, Pugh orchestrated that reaction by cherry-picking through his own iconography. But the references to earlier collections—the stripes, the floating scarf points, the billowing balloon-y volumes, the monochrome—were so expertly refreshed that there was never a moment of déjà vu. Even the most churlish viewer would have to acknowledge the validity of this designer's approach, which is all about refining with intense precision one very particular point of view, rather than roaming that universe his woman seeks to rule.
27 September 2011
Unlike his fashion showman peers, Gareth Pugh never gives his collections a title or clarifies a theme for them. He sees his work as a single seamless flow of ideas that expands or contracts to his bidding. His Fall collection might have been a contraction—or at least a consolidation. After several seasons of experimenting with film in collaboration with the budding genius Ruth Hogben, it was time again for Pugh to remind his audience of the physicality of what he does. In other words, it was showtime.Pugh's support team is so attuned to him, you feel they could do this in their sleep—Matthew Stone contributed the gut-rumbling electronic soundtrack, Simon Costin created the futuristic-yet-primal backdrop, Alex Box did the mutant makeup ("spectral light" was her guideline). And Pugh provided the clothes: the tabard shapes, the strictly defined jackets cut on the square that fell away into points, the broad-shouldered pieces in bonded or articulated leather—all of them in Stygian black. This language is his and his alone, which is striking in one so young (he'll be 30 in August). It is also so defined that it is sometimes difficult to see how Pugh can grow it. Fall confirmed clues. Fluidity has become his friend. So has color. A black sheath with a cobalt blue cape attached was one of the show's strongest pieces. And Pugh may even have relaxed enough that he can now accommodate humor. The menswear in this show featured young models with torso-limning tops that erupted into chiffon pants with the flowing volumes of a floor-length skirt, or a parish priest's robes. It was, in fact, boyhood memories of the latter that inspired Pugh. The same wry religiosity probably accounted for the cross composed of intersecting zippers on the flaring, leather-sleeve dress that opened the show. That kind of detail suggested Pugh toying with his status as Crown Prince of the Fashion Goths.He then dispelled the gothic gloom with a finale that armored his models in gold. Karlie Kloss was a fallen angel in her capelet, dress, and leggings. Why Pugh's men looked priestly when his women looked pagan might be the stuff of a thesis—or a film treatment, if Ruth Hogben doesn't already have enough on her plate.
1 March 2011
It's somehow typical of Gareth's Pugh-ness that the designer would encourage his soundtrack-ist Matthew Stone to come up with something a little more up-tempo than last season's stentorian sounds…and, for his pains, get the pounding techno that accompanied the 11-minute film that budding genius Ruth Hogben made to replace his show this time around. ("Half the length ofCoronation Street," was Pugh's stipulation, referring to the episodic, quintessentially English TV series.) But it all worked so completely that, among the people filing out of the auditorium where they'd just been exposed to an almost-IMAX-scale projection of the movie, several must have been thinking it was time more designers ditched the catwalk drudgery. Mind you, the scope of Pugh's vision lends itself to cinematic interpretation. Kristen McMenamy, a model whose hold on a rung on the ladder of nineties supermodel-dom probably qualifies her as iconic, gave her all to animate clothes that would have lain limp in a standard fashion presentation. Her all, in this case, included the injury she suffered when she was pitched off a treadmill during filming.If that hard edge would once have been equally applicable to Pugh's clothes, his Spring collection suggested a move toward something softer, though equally bewitching. Flowing kimono shapes were cut from a nylon printed with aluminum to give an extraordinary two-way mirror effect. Scales of rubberized neoprene added a snaky futurism to tops and pants. Pugh pulled off a feat of cutting in tunics he called "modular," the same front and back. And, keen as he was to avoid the sci-fi tag that has been continually attached to his clothes, he still showed sinuous silvery pieces that clung to the body like thirty-first-century armor.What Hogben's film highlighted was the fluidity and movement inherent in Pugh's clothing. A runway could never have done that—nor could the lookbook images that were circulated after the screening.
28 September 2010
Gareth Pugh's emblematic chevron is also one of the symbols of Art Deco, and the glamour of the Deco years in Hollywood was one of the sub-currents in the designer's latest collection. That meant he continued to move away from the hard alien edge that was once his signature in favor of a more sinuous line. Karlie Kloss in an obi-belted cashmere wool coat with matching flared pants? Nouvelle Dietrich! Likewise the full-length fishtailed gown in chevrons of chiffon and leather, with a capelet draped over the shoulders. Twenty-first-century Adrian!Pugh led with suits of solid-looking neoprene-backed leathers. He said he wanted his women to look strong, but they looked stiff in light of what was to come. He went up a gear with a coat-dress and pants in a samurailike glazed basket weave, a glamorous cape coat with frayed edges, and an asymmetrical crocheted coat over leggings. They had the drama that the designer's fans expect, but they were an evolution of the softer, more romantic mood he initiated for Spring. His key silhouette—an A-line cut on the square, falling away to points, with a natural shoulder—was all about movement. He emphasized that further with a group of pieces draped in fine chains, which slithered like flapper dresses. Pugh accessorized the collection with men in outfits that were designed to emphasize masculine vulnerability in the face of feminine strength. Hence, pleated palazzo pants for the guy in your life.
2 March 2010
Backstage, after a show that emphasized a diaphanous, romantic mood, Gareth Pugh admitted he'd been nervous about moving so far away from the hard-edged, super-structured looks that earned him his rung on the fashion ladder. Well, his nerves were needless, because this collection marked a very necessary widening of Pugh's fashion vocabulary.If, once upon a time (the fairy-tale connotations are unavoidable), a Pugh show was all about the Beast, this time the focus was on Beauty. But she was eerie, a postapocalyptic princess. The first outfit—an unstructured trench belted over a floating chiffon dress in tone-on-tone shades of gray—set the mood, along with wrapped heads, makeup that shaded the models' faces as though they'd walked through an ash cloud, and a Matthew Stone soundtrack that featured a stentorian interpretation of the theme fromRequiem for a Dream(required listening for all aficionados of glamorous doom). Pugh's experimentation with fabrics was as obsessive as ever, with feather-light tops, dresses, and pants that were micro-pleated or woven or slashed in crepe or chiffon. But the effect was a kind of moon-glow lightness, rather than the alien articulation his clothes once relied on. And when there was extreme structure, it was effectively used, as in lapels that unfurl the more they are unzipped on a cape-backed dress.The designer mixed womenswear and menswear in his show. His men's clothes were significantly more restrictive (as in corseted) than his women's. Given a front row that embraced Rihanna, Michael Stipe, Terence Koh, and Adrian Grenier fromEntourage, Pugh is perhaps a better student of human nature than we appreciate.
29 September 2009
The invitation—a black-and-white photo of boiling clouds—cued the elemental spirit of Gareth Pugh's new collection. Aware of how often he's been stuck in a sci-fi box, the designer stressed, "This is not from a spaceship, it's from under the ground. I wanted it to feel earthy." If the palette—black, gray, and hematite, the color of oxidized iron—was of this earth, it was definitely somewhere way down inside. Matthew Stone's soundtrack, which used a piece of the Krzysztof Penderecki music fromThe Shining, compounded the mines-of-Mordor mood.Pugh presented his new looks in mesmerizing video form. And in that context, his clothes made perfect sense in a way that they haven't always on the runway. While the 2-D format meant it took a visit to the showroom to appreciate the texture of Pinhead outfits carpeted with fine spikes like a lethal fur, it did allow for a chance to see the clothes in movement, whipped into aerodynamic shapes on screen by an elemental wind. The designer's new silhouette—falling away in a pleated-back A-line from a small shoulder—was the direct inverse of the triangular shape that made his name. It gave a swirling, capelike volume to coats and jackets. The new trouser shape—high-waisted, with a full pant that covered Pugh's platformed footwear—also amplified the volume moving around the body. (The shoes themselves looked like snub-snouted devil dogs; they almost seemed to be grinning evilly.)Otherwise, the collection followed on very closely from the menswear Pugh showed in January (he is also selling those clothes in women's sizes). That was particularly apparent in detailing like the triangles that patterned an ornately worked mink jacket or the hooded, pointed-hem leather coat that is his signature piece. When other designers imagine a complementary couple in their collections for men and women, it's usually as boyfriend and girlfriend. Pugh sees a brother and sister in his clothes, siblings ruling his tragic kingdom. There's something appropriately Jacobean about such a notion as it applies to fashion's most theatrically dark designer.
3 March 2009
The latest English enfant terrible to take his show on the road, Gareth Pugh, promised that his Paris debut would mix showroom and showpieces. In other words, commerce and creativity uniting to broadcast Pugh's business savvy on a much wider platform than London had allowed him. But if that implies compromise, forget it. The sonorous horror horns that announced the presentation suggested something wicked this way comes, and sure enough, Pugh mined the curious mother lode—Joan Crawford meets Predator—that he's established as his design signature. The exaggerated shoulder; the nipped waist; the articulated limbs, elbows, and shoulders projected to sci-fi points: all present and correct.Post-show, Pugh talked about the duality of outfits that were all white in front, all black in back. The notion of emerging from darkness was his contribution to the irrational optimism of the Spring season as it has unraveled in New York, London, Milan, and now Paris. But there was also an inescapable subtext of protection in outfits with breastplates that jutted up over the face. The historicism that distinguishes the work of Central Saint Martins' brightest stars was evident in pieces that suggested the armor of a medieval knight. Elizabeth I's concertina-ed ruff exploded round one model's neck, down another's dress. There was a Victorian starchiness in pleated underskirts. But Pugh shoved all this history into a futuristic fantasy zone with a wrapped coat that looked like pixels, or a dress composed of vinyl petals like reptilian scales.In the light of such eldritch constructions, it was funny to hear the designer talk about slashing vents into the clothes "because this is a Spring collection." That's what constitutes a commercial consideration in his extraordinary, hermetic world.
26 September 2008
Sometime during the genesis of Gareth Pugh's latest collection,The Wizard of Ozbumped intoPredator. The result was the kind of showy fashion farrago that has been a London staple since…oh, at least since Stonehenge was built. Coco Rocha marched out in a samurai dress made from zippers, and we were off. The zipper peplum, the zipper panniers, and the huge zipper shoulder pads were exploded components of what might almost have been a Joan Crawford costume, if she'd ever gotten to play the Predator Queen of Outer Space. Those famously exaggerated Crawford shoulders could also be inferred from a hooded gray flannel cape, or in-furred from the huge, shaggy goat-hair "epaulets" on a wrapped coat.Pugh set out to make his models look like warrior women, emphasizing shoulders throughout with, first, the zips, then the flannel, the goat hair, and finally, polyhedra in leather or PVC. What that all pointed to was the weirdly Hollywood-ish glamour of the collection, recasting familiar items with diva-esque excess, hard edges, and a little wit: a tunic dress made entirely from safety pins, for instance; or a white coat-dress with a bolero back, also trimmed in safety pins; or almost any of the pieces that found creative things to do with all that goat hair. The fact that many of the shapes were surprisingly basic under the decorative add-ons (a quilted wind coat or a voluminous parka made up of polyhedra looked positively commercial) only made it clearer that Pugh is the latest in an illustrious line of British designers for whom the show's the thing. The partisan crowd shrieked with glee. When Pugh played Gary Glitter's chant, "D'you wanna be in my gang?" at the finale, there was no question about it.
12 February 2008
You had to wonder quite how the models were going to make an entrance onto Gareth Pugh's runway, what with that giant white rubber balloon blocking the door. Then, with a big pop, the thing exploded, and on came an individual with a glittery cube for a headpiece and a top-to-toe outfit in Swarovski crystal mesh. This time round, there seemed less of the screamy reaction that usually greets his high-camp performance pieces. Maybe fewer of Pugh's club-kid fans had fought their way in. Or is this the start of a post-novelty cooling-off phase, as all and sundry are left to contemplate how this dedicated enfant terrible is really going to earn a crust?From the runway pieces, it's quite possible to see how his dark-side coats, with their giant fringe-bristling shoulders, might find certain takers in the rock industry. As one-offs, they could fill the stage of any stadium. A stole made of white mink mice, complete with red eyes and tails? It could work for an encore. Or as window-dressing, come Halloween, perhaps. Real world, though? Hard to imagine many female customers for his ribbon-leather body dresses, no matter how much slaving it takes to sew them. Perhaps the conundrum will be solved when buyers travel to Paris to see Pugh's collection up close under Rick Owens' roof. Owens' wife, Michele Lamy, who has a stellar reputation as a manager, is overseeing Pugh's production. Maybe there are moderated designs in the works. There need to be, unless Pugh is quite happy to continue, hand-to-mouth, relying on the indulgence of sponsors, and the diminishing returns as newer designers come up.
15 September 2007
The buildup to the Gareth Pugh show had all the ingredients of the legendary British fashion happenings of the eighties and nineties: heaving tent packed with club kids and drag queens; major international editors present and correct; 80-minute wait just to get everyone steamed up. Part anticipation, part exasperation, it's a buzz that only descends when London'son, and Pugh's rubber-masked, cyber-freaky, balloon-bouncing theater is largely responsible for bringing back the excitement in this city. Without his ever having sold a stitch.This time, though, he had a shock lined up: a collection of outstandingly constructed black and black-and-white coats, some in fur, intricately pieced together in contrasting stripes. "I was sick of people saying, 'It's crazy,' " said Pugh, backstage. As a designer, he's already established an influential shape—all those big, swathed, cowl-like necklines others are picking up on. Now he's working up exaggeratedly built-out shoulders he likens toThe Wicker Man. Again, these look certain to be directional.What really surprised, though, were the fur pieces—like a generously easy belted cardigan with a hood, and a black-and-white striped wrap-front short coat, and, later, a couple of chunky knitted coats banded in patent stripes. Any of these would attract envy rather than ridicule in the street. As for the styling—you still have to ignore the hair and makeup, and overlook the creepy section of see-through plastic stripes. Those were crowd-pleasers for Pugh's club-claque, but otherwise the boy is showing promising signs of outgrowing the thrill of being poor and mocked. "I'm working with Kopenhagen Fur and having the coats made in Italy," he confided. "And La Perla is making my stockings." Which is quite a development for Pugh's detractors to mull at leisure.
14 February 2007
The cotton-covered runway suddenly inflated into a billowing river, and out stepped a latex-masked creature in humongous Lucite platforms and a full-skirted checkerboard dress. He, she, it (gender soon ceased to matter) was followed by yet more outrageous figures, their completely covered bodies and faces sprouting 3-D geometrical protrusions. Each was wearing some kind of coat made in bristling patchworks of black-and-white vinyl, survival-blanket silver foil, or plastic blown up with air.Welcome to the insane world of Gareth Pugh, a young man capable of distorting the human body almost beyond recognition. Get sucked in for a moment, and you can believe you're watching characters from some monstrous sci-fi computer animation coming to life before your eyes. On that level—i.e., the level of mind-altering theatrics—what Pugh's up to is very well done. He gets it partly from his background as a costume designer (at the precocious age of 14) for the English National Youth Theatre, and partly from London's extreme club scene.Backstage, this strange creative force turns out to be a soft-spoken boy who says he was inspired by watching Ridley Scott's 1985 fantasy movieLegend, "where Princess Lili dances in a white room and becomes her darker self." Will there ever be clothes to wear here? Maybe one day. Rumors abound that Pugh may receive backing from that other dark-side designer, Rick Owens, with whom he once interned.
18 September 2006
Just when it seemed like the good old days of rebellious British eccentricity were over, along comes a pale youth, late of Central Saint Martins, who stages a fashion carnival for his first solo show. His name is Gareth Pugh, a lad from dour, post-industrial Sunderland, and he sent out a parade of perverse-looking harlequins with pom-pom hairdos, painted faces, and pointy hats. They wore vinyl bodysuits, towering platform Doc Martens, gargantuan ruffs, and voluminous checkered boleros and coats in black and gold. If the effect was a bit silly, there was also something defiantly ridiculous in devoting so much time and money to something so playful. To set the tone, he bounced a few giant black-and-white helium balloons into the audience before the show began. (Pugh has a thing about balloons.)Though Pugh is the new sensation among the febrile design-student London clique, he's merely the latest addition to a long tradition of fashion-as-performance-art that stretches back through Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Vivienne Westwood to the eighties club culture of Leigh Bowery. That, of course, is ancient history to Pugh's generation, who grew up starved of fashion fun in the dour days of grunge and minimalism. It's no wonder that kids like him want to break out a bit now. As for grown-ups who might worry how he'll survive, well, there were precisely two coats—one with mink sleeves and a ruffled front, and another with hyperinflated lapels (that balloon influence again)—that might just keep the wolf from his door.
14 February 2006