Next season will mark 10 years since Gareth Pugh's first show, but it isn't only time that's been weighing on him. There's been a sense for a while that Pugh was feeling a little stuck with the whole runway routine in Paris, so when Lexus offered to sponsor an event for him in New York, he leapt at the opportunity to change more than location. No catwalk this time. Instead, 'an immersive presentation,' promising a multimedia assault of sight, sound, and movement. 'I've always wanted to do it,' said Pugh, 'but I never had the handbag.' Lexus did, and a very deep one it was, too. The venue for last night's performance was a massive space on one of Manhattan's downtown piers, kitted out with screens, bars, a substantial VIP area, and the merest smattering of familiar faces to dress it, including SJP, Maggie Gyllenhaal (whose performance in The Honorable Woman on the Sundance Channel is moving goalposts), Catherine Keener, and Andy Cohen.
To be honest, none of that really felt like the Pugh we know and love. The scale of the event defied focus. There was clearly a journey of some kind, opening in a space that was surrounded by a circle of screens like a techno-Stonehenge, each featuring looks from Pugh's Spring collection. The next space featured one long screen offering an anarchic panorama. If Pugh's live presentations have often had a ceremonial stateliness, here the models were in constant, frenzied, skittering movement. The clothes flew by in blurs: witches, ninjas, maybe even a scarecrow. There looked to be some spectacular hats. (More will be revealed when Ruth Hogben, Pugh's longtime collaborator in image-making, edits a more 'conventional' lookbook out of the footage, which, says the designer, will be released around the date he would normally be showing in Paris.) And then, for the last 'act' of the evening, there were hardly any clothes at all. Seven dancers from British choreographer Wayne McGregor's Random Company writhed and contorted in an extraordinary performance that suggested new life-forms emerging while, projected behind them, an angel rose in the slowest motion, her wings rising and spreading in tattered splendor. A phoenix, Pugh called her.
The essential oppositions in his work-between the natural and the synthetic, the body and the machine-were still on display, but Pugh's mind was elsewhere. As much as he'd found an artful alternative to showing his new collection, he'd used the opportunity given to him by Lexus to explore something more abstract: the emotion that had gone into creating those clothes. That's why the most successful part of the journey was its end, with the Random dancers. Nothing to do with clothes, everything to do with body and soul.
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