There is a learning curve even for designers who are fueled by buzz out of the gate. In Prabal Gurung’s case, that was five years ago, yet it’s been only recently — as in now — that he’s hit what feels like a real maturation point. Like Gurung’s last collection, spring was inspired by his native Nepal, and working from a personal point of view has yielded the designer’s best stuff. Here, he channeled the Himalayas with mountaineering references and staples of Nepalese femininity, such as the rhododendron, the national flower, romancing the former as anorak details on the back of a jacket and using trekking maps and mountain landscapes as the basis for embroideries and jacquards. Many of the clothes also had a sporty vibe: cocktail dresses with racerbacks and strapless gowns worn under crop tops. “Not because it’s a trend, but because this is how women wear [clothes in Nepal],” said Gurung, in preemptive defense of copping to a well-circulated look. No accusations here.
Gurung has also clearly received the memo that designers who don’t invest in fabric development are not in the game, raising his own bar with ostrich feather embellishments and dresses with an impressive 3-D floral technique that involved needlework, screen printing and hand-painting.