HIS PARIS DEBUT PROVES THAT GARETH PUGH'S IMAGINATION IS AS WILD AS EVER, BUT OFF THE RUNWAY HE'S GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
Not very long ago, Gareth Pugh’s studio sat in an abandoned South London warehouse squat shared by assorted club kids and artists. A mangy wild dog lived there too, and out of fear that the little terror would eat his fabric, Pugh became prisoner in his own makeshift atelier. Just three years later, the 27-year-old designer found himself taking a bow at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo. “I didn’t even know where to buy cigarettes in Paris, let alone thread,” he laughs. “But it was nice to be in a situation where it was scary again, where it felt like my first show.”
Last summer Pugh followed in the footsteps of Martin Margiela and Viktor & Rolf to win the ANDAM Prize; its 150,000 euro purse enabled the move. While the setting changed—the attending editors new, the girls bigger, and the production ramped up—much remained the same. Longtime collaborators Matthew Stone and Katie Shillingford were there to create the sound track and to style. London youthquake publicist Mandi Lennard ran the front of house. And pouty-faced, crazy-haired BoomBox kids checked tickets at the entrance. “I didn’t want to change just because I’m showing in Paris,” says Pugh. “The idea for me was to do exactly what I would do in London, but change the context.”
Equal parts samurai, Edward I, and Darth Vader, the show, as it would have been in London, was anything but conventional. Lily Donaldson sported armored shoulder spikes. Heidi Mount’s face barely showed behind a massive forward-jutting breastplate. Karlie Kloss’s structured warrior dress softened to an almost shredded texture at the waist. Edwardian ruffles migrated from the neck to the shoulders to the ankles. Each look was white in the front, black in the back, as if emerging from the dark to the light with every stomp. “I kept imagining cutting off the models’ heads and sticking on Daphne Guinness, someone who has the confidence, money, and brazenness to wear it,” says Pugh. “I have to just do what I like, and hope others like it. Of course, if they don’t, well, that pie chart the factory sends me won’t be very big.”
While a Gareth Pugh dress provokes, Gareth Pugh is no provocateur. His temperament is even-keeled. He is eager to talk sales and business plans. Part of his rationale for decamping to Paris was the fear of being pigeonholed. “I didn’t want to get stuck with the whole British club kid performance artist thing,” he says. “That’s the environment in London. In Paris it’s different. And I felt like I should move to a city where I would have, not a more respectful audience, but one that takes fashion a lot more seriously. And where I would have something of a blank canvas.”
Pugh explains that he is “bored of inaccessible.” He enjoys the challenge of working within a confined creative space. He relishes the dictates of his factory, of his Michelle Lamy–headed sales team. He talks of taking his “ideas”—when he says ideas, there is a twinkle in his eye—and “making them into something tangible that people can actually understand.” (Or at least buy.) Yes, the shows are out-there; he only gets two a year and wants to make the most of them. But every monstrous showpiece still aims to make a woman beautiful. “You take off this and take off that, and make it a dress. It just has to have,” he pauses a moment, “it has to be other than what you’d see someone walk down the street in. I don’t ever want to show just a dress.” Jacob Brown
Photography Ellen Von Unwerth
Retouching Charles Cannet Digital
