There have been so many collections on the New York and London fashion week runways that featured items borrowed, stolen, copied or plagiarised from other collections that, by now, there doesn't seem to be much point in writing proper reviews of the next seasons designs. Maybe it would be more logical to simply juxtapose the original and the copy and let readers judge like many ordinary people, students and sarcastic fashion fans are by now doing on Instagram. Yet there have also been different degrees of borrowing and stealing.
While most designers opted to copy relatively recent fashion collections, Gareth Pugh turned to costumes for "inspiration", but that was only logical since he also chose to launch his collection with a fashion film aired at the London IMAX rather than with a traditional presentation.
Directed by photographer Nick Knight, with choreographies by Wayne McGregor and featuring French artist, painter, sculptor and performer Olivier De Sagazan and Gareth Pugh himself, the film is a bit like a painfully hip arty nightmare suspended between Francis Bacon and Antonin Artaud.
The film features indeed dark images and opens with Olivier De Sagazan transfiguring with clay his body and Pugh's, creating skin extensions and pregnant bellies that seem to give birth to more monstrous piles of clay and hair.
The scene then changes to follow a group of dancers (almost references to the costumes Pugh did for ballet performances such as "Carbon Life" for The Royal Ballet in 2012 and "Alea Sands" for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2015) - their black clothes with prints of flames giving the impression the dancers are on fire.
As a whole, though, the film takes itself too seriously and looks a lot like one of those meaningless videos you only watch for three seconds at a biennale event before moving on to the next piece of contemporary art.
The less convincing "costumes" in the film are the samurai cages and the metallic looks: the latter dramatically elongate the body via rigid tubes. These designs are actually extremely similar to the ones in the opening frames of William Klein's Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966).
This satire of the fashion industry opens indeed with a catwalk show by designer Isidore Ducasse. These scenes became rather famous among fashion and cinema fans as Ducasse presents a series of aluminium dresses that are supposed to form the wardrobe for the nuclear age woman (the designs were employed by Klein as a parody of '60s metal fashion creations à la Paco Rabanne; every now and then these designs reappeared on more recent runways).
Sitting in the front row of Ducasse's show, Miss Maxwell - editor in chief of a famous fashion magazine and opinion maker - bizarrelly thinks the designs are beautiful and Ducasse's unwearable outfits manage to pass for the works of a genius, while Miss Maxwell stands up at the end of the show claiming "He's recreated woman!"
Pugh's shapes in this collection seem to have lost the cutting edge of his early designs to be replaced by unwearable ideas; his extremely elongated volumes or metallic armours hiding the face of the wearer do not seem to produce any radical protest message against an industry that has become vapid, but simply confirm the fact that fashion has become irrelevant and it is extremely detached from reality.
In a nutshell, if Pugh had gone for a parodic approach that took the drama out of fashion in a lighter and more ethereal way, it would have been much better.
So, should Pugh go for film rather than fashion? Well, this filmic experiment that reeks of the syndrome of David Lynch and of our collective passion for graphic horror images, proves that the designer should be very careful since, if he goes on like this, rather than following Tom Ford's cinematic steps, he may end up falling into the Kenneth Anger trap that swallowed the Mulleavy sisters at the Venice International Film Festival.
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