LONDON, FEBRUARY 20, 2016
by MAYA SINGER
Gareth Pugh put on quite a show tonight. Taking over the grandiose Freemasons' Hall in Covent Garden, he sat much of the audience proscenium-style, and preceded his défilé with 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, when Hillary Clinton wins 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 for Spring, 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 directed Working 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?
I think I love him the show design style,nice
