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 spectacular The 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.
