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 of Coronation 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.
