![]() ![]() And a frothy cascade of blue chiffon and gauze was positively witchy. ![]() An hourglass dress with matching armbands rising to the shoulder in oversize gold sequins looked like cut glass or spun sugar. A stiff coat made from gold and brilliant blue diving suit fabric, banded in black, seemed ready to take flight. And these looked as though they might have been taken off the backs of the divas of some secret mystic organization. Luckily, Pitti had invited Pugh to display a few key pieces on dressmaker’s dummies early on the morning before the show. Sequins flashed, balloon shapes blew up around all these beautiful bodies, and eventually everything got wet, but it was hard to get much of an idea about the actual clothes. Presented on two 22-meter-long rectangular ceiling screens hanging from the rafters in one of the Orsanmichele towers, Natasa Vojnovic, Jonathan Baker, and a few other dancers twisted and leapt over the audience like a pack of sexy gargoyles for Pugh’s fresco. “There’s people coming out of blackness, halos over heads, sins and angels.” “It’s kind of like those beautiful Caravaggio paintings,” he says of the small collection he designed for the show in Florence. The two have been almost inseparable ever since, and it now appears that Hogben’s scenarios inspire Pugh to design. Instead of doing a traditional runway show, Pugh decided to produce a 12-minute, fashion-show-length film, directed by frequent collaborator Ruth Hogben, whom he met when she was assisting the photographer Nick Knight. I visited Florence last October and looked at Italian history going into art, architecture, and religious iconography, and it inspired me.” ![]() “The collection is a subtle hint to what I will show next March in Paris, and it’s based as usual on the juxtaposition of hard/soft, masculine/feminine and light/dark. “For me, this is a big honor,” says Pugh. At 29, he is precariously juggling his maverick design sense with the fragile cash flow of a young business. I took the tall, thin gentleman walking a few paces in front of me, dressed in a coat of swirling strips of black leather and multi-buckle boots, for a Florentine eccentric before he turned around and I recognized the familiar face of Gareth Pugh. Now a fixture in Paris, where he shows his men’s and women’s collections together, Pugh is one of the first English designers, along with Christopher Kane, who is growing his eponymous business in London rather than designing full-time for a major European label. The Pitti organization is no slouch, either: each season it sponsors original shows in historic sites throughout Florence, from young designers like Adam Kimmel, Kris Van Assche and Raf Simons.įor Pugh, this invitation from Florence was an opportunity to show color, which he has rarely done since he began presenting his collections in 2005 in London. Together, they form an unruly troika, responsible for some of the most exciting and spontaneous ideas in clothes today. The occasion was Gareth Pugh’s small collection show for Pitti, the Italian trade fair devoted to menswear, which includes a women’s annex for pre-collections, those early-bird designs that keep cash register ringing before the spring and winter merchandise arrives.ĭespite the demands of today’s fashion business, Pugh remains happily untamed, as does his Paris backer Michele Lamy (who also manages Rick Owens, her partner in work and life). Last Thursday night, the place to find it was in the double towers of the 14th century Orsanmichele church in Florence. GAZIA/NONAMEPHOTOĬhristmas is over, it’s raining, and everything is on sale-but the dreamier side of life is there, if you know where to look. ![]()
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