See-now-buy-now is hardly a topic for a fashion showman like Gareth Pugh, who uses clothes to create an atmosphere alive with foreboding, female empowerment and disquieting beauty.
The narrative this season was particularly dense and evocative, for his spring collection dovetailed from an assignment from the Paris Opera: more than 60 costumes for “Eliogabalo,” a 17th-century Italian play about a perverse tyrant.
“From the Opera Garnier to a car park in the middle of Soho to tell the same story,” Pugh enthused backstage, for the premiere in the French capital had been the night before.
With its soundtrack of furious drumming, the show had a knife-to-the-throat intensity that is rare in London, where a great many collections exalt British eccentricity, from quaint to zany.
Pugh opened with a series of cocooning black coats gleaming with dense, 3-D gold bullion in mosaic formations. Gold shards embellished lean cotton pantsuits with flared legs and lean leather dominatrix dresses.
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Regal and ecclesiastical silhouettes ultimately gave way to sultry draping, with strips of chiffon or points of jersey lapping at bare legs. Everything had a sci-fi gloss, sometime dystopian a la “Mad Max,” but more often idealistic a la “Star Wars.”
While he insisted the show was not political, he drew a parallel to modern times in describing the opera’s protagonist — a child emperor in imperial Rome — as “an agent of chaos, a crowned anarchist, emerging amid a climate of greed and narcissism. It’s essentially about an empire eating itself, which felt alarmingly relevant.”
Pugh made it clear he was alluding to the U.S., and not post-Brexit Britain. But he insisted he wanted to send a positive message with all his sun-ray stripes and gleaming fabrics and embellishments.
The slogan T-shirt he wore backstage drove home the message: “Optimism Is the Ultimate Rebellion,” it read.