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  • Ahimsa
    Vegan Police
    • Sep 2011
    • 1879

    Gareth Pugh in NYFW

    From The New York Times.

    "The questions of whether traditional fashion shows have any validity anymore, and whether they are actually entertainment and we should just embrace the change, are about to enter the conversation again.

    Gareth Pugh, the upstart English designer championed by Rick Owens, has shown his regal-’n’-rough, razor-tailored/alien romance creations (this sounds weird, but they are actually often both smart and beautiful) during Paris Fashion Week for the last six years. Now he is switching sides and cities, and this season he will hold what he describes as an “immersive live performance” to open the New York shows.

    “There’s a point at which old archetypes need to change,” Mr. Pugh, 32, said in a phone call. “Fashion is very stuck in its ways, and I wanted to present something that would make people think, and maybe move the needle a bit.”

    What Mr. Pugh is planning to do to “make people think” involves both video and live dancers, though not his entire spring 2015 collection.

    “I know this is a business, and we need to sell clothes, but it is also about image and inspiration, and sometimes a live show can miss the mark a bit,” Mr. Pugh said. “The lights go up, the model walks out, and you lose control of it. It’s really important to not only communicate, ‘This is a nice dress’ or ‘This is a cool trouser,’ but to sell the dream.”
    Even if, as he admits, it may be “hard to appreciate the way the clothes are made” in a performance, where the viewer can’t see them as clearly as during a show.

    The decision to do this during New York Fashion Week came because the event is being underwritten by Lexus, which approached Mr. Pugh last year about doing a project with the company. However, the performance is bound to have more impact in the first of the fashion week cities than it might in, say, Paris, which traditionally hosts numerous more “creative” and conceptual shows.

    New York, by contrast is known (and, admittedly, stereotyped) as being both more business-focused and less aesthetically imaginative. The more out-there designers who have been part of the week, such as, say, Miguel Adrover, are often labeled “weird.” In this context, Mr. Pugh’s experiment will unquestionably make him stand out from the crowd, though whether that will be in a good way or a bad way is not yet clear.

    “I know it’s a big risk,” he said. “And I’m worried. But I think it’s good to light a fire under your bum every once in a while.” (It should be pointed out that Mr. Pugh already sells at Barneys, Bergdorf’s and Neiman Marcus, so he has a certain amount of local support.)

    Costing “a hell of a lot more than our usual show would cost” (though he is not sure how much, exactly), the event will be held Sept. 4, off the official fashion week schedule. Though it is still in the planning stages, Mr. Pugh said his team is looking at venues such as Public School 57 in Manhattan, and speaking to the choreographer Wayne McGregor, resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet in London, about using his troupe, Random Dance, in the event.

    “It was just too good an opportunity to pass up,” said Mr. Pugh, who spoke to the Chambre Syndicale, which organizes the Paris week, about the switch. He said they were supportive, and would hold a slot for him to return to the Paris schedule next year. (In any case, because New York Fashion Week is so early, the entire collection will not be ready at the time of the performance; it will be sold to retailers two weeks later, in Paris.)

    Mr. Pugh has, admittedly, been here before — conceptually if not literally. Though he has never shown in New York, he has swapped the catwalk for the cinema before, making a short film instead of a runway show in Paris for both fall 2009 and spring 2011. Personally (I was there), I found that the inability to see a complete collection made it difficult to assess from a critical point of view, but Mr. Pugh said he was happy with the results.

    Louise Wilson — the former course director of the Fashion M.A. program at Central St. Martins in London, who died in May — “used to talk about the importance of how clothes are presented,” said Mr. Pugh, “and how that had been lost, and everyone just did the same thing. This is a chance to change that. ”

    In a little more than a month, we’ll see if he is right."
    StyleZeitgeist Magazine | Store
  • ambrosian
    Senior Member
    • Dec 2012
    • 180

    #2
    Are more designers going to follow this restructuring? Possible Helmut Lang-esque reshuffling or am I being too optimistic?
    street goth extraordinaire

    Comment

    • Geoffrey B. Small
      Senior Member
      • Nov 2007
      • 618

      #3
      Yeah, and look at what happened to him. I am sorry, but New York is the LaBrea tar pit for creative designers. I grew up in Boston, won my first big design prizes from New York when I was 19, and spent the first 15 years of my career just hours away from there, and ending showing in Paris thousands of miles away across the ocean instead. I had many brushes with the city and the people who make up the infrastructure of the industry there and it is simply not the place to go if you are intent upon being a serious avant-garde creative designer with any real global market. Every city with a big fashion week has a niche, a target, a specialization. And New York's is not that.

      Rather, it is the best place to sell to the US and North, Central and Southern American markets in a big commercial way and with American mass media hype, bar none. Sometimes like now, if the dollar is cheap, you can sell to a few other markets like Japan, but they are buying you more for the price and currency valuations- not your true work, so beware. When the dollar goes up, you will go down.

      You do New York when you hope to reach the big commercial network that ties huge department store distribution number potentials with Vogue USA and Anna W's hype machine. That is why Helmut went there after the Prada buyout of his company when Bertelli was trying to push the Lang label business to 100 million dollars a year plus (and quite quickly tanked the whole darn thing into the mud as a result). That is why McQueen showed there in 1996 to help snag and secure his first backers, Kashiyama and Gibo, and finally get a real collection business off the ground. That is why Rick Owens showed there as a stepping stone on his way to be able to show in Paris. Make note, that he didn't stay showing there very long, once was enough to make the deal with Anna W and then get on to the real arena for showing world-class avant-garde.

      And this Pugh venture is no different. The people who own Gareth Pugh now are realizing that something has to be done to start selling it enough to recupe all of the investments already sunk. And the bottom line is, Gareth Pugh is a difficult sell for a product that needs to be ramped up to so much scale. So, they pull the Lang move again, or the Y3, or the Marithe & Francoise Girbaud, or the Barbara Bui, or whatever tom, dick or harry whose owners or management feel that their sales are not really cutting it fast enough in the Paris system (it's actually known as a ten year game) to get to 100 mill in annual sales. Because that's what you need if you are going to show there as a regular- minimum-and be a contender. 100 million. That is what that game is about. It has nothing to do with creativity. It is all about how much money you have and are turning, and how big you are. And make no mistake, the press coverage is not free. You pay for it. Dearly.

      And that is why the real creatives cannot reach their true potential there, no matter how much they would like to be able to. Creativity has nothing to do with bigness. Indeed, very much the opposite.

      Like I said, every city has to have its niche. And the world showplace for creativity is Paris's niche, no ifs ands or buts. Hands down since 1850. The very concept of clothes designer was invented there by Charles Frederick Worth.

      And as the first American-based designer to go over there season after season to do avant-garde work since 1993, I can more than vouch for that fact. We knew our goals and we knew the 2 cities well enough to know that we had to make a choice. And we did so, we chose Paris. At first most of the press and industry thought we were radical or stupid (depending upon what part of the business they were coming from) and should be showing our collection in New York as we were so close to the city just up in Boston, but within three years- we had shown that you could do it from America if your stuff was real enough, and by the end of the nineties, American-based designers had followed our trail and were all over the Paris fashion calendar.

      So, sorry, but don't let the hype fool you. Pugh's owners want (or need) to cash in big, probably too soon. And that is what this move to show in New York is all about. But the track record for these types of ventures is not very good. Take a look at Helmut, for example. More often than not, the tar pits don't cough up the dough the backers are hoping for, and the creativity of the artist steadily wanes away into commercial quagmire (look for example at what happened to Thuyskens work). There is something about the intense global creative competition in Paris that is critical in keeping you sharp season after season. So when you are not in it. You can get out of shape, fast. In the end, total commitment, concentration and focus are what is required to build the great creative designer brand. That means a long-term approach, dedicated to Paris as the presentation point, and generally, an ownership that understands that it is now a really long-term game. LV, Hermes, Chanel etc. are now 4 and 5 generation businesses. Jumping around to NYC is not going to change things... besides Ralph has been there a lifetime too, and he owns that town. Like so many things Pugh and the entire CSM crowd seem addicted to doing, the only real thing the project will accomplish for sure, is getting some press. And they already have plenty of that.

      What they really need though now is more fleeting though, and I personally do not believe this is the right direction for them to go in. But alas, Gareth is owned by others, and once you give up your independence as an artist financially, all sorts of things can happen that lead to wayward paths of glory or failure. And I can attest to that, as well.

      Good luck to Gareth Pugh in NY. My guess is we will see him back in the real arena soon enough. Hopefully, his work won't have suffered any from dipping his toes into the tar pits.

      Best wishes,
      Geoffrey

      p.s. if he wants to do something in Brooklyn however, that would be an entirely different matter.

      Comment

      • Faust
        kitsch killer
        • Sep 2006
        • 37852

        #4
        Ambrosian, you might have missed the sponsored-by-Lexus part. Obviously, it's a one-off.

        P.S. And, basically, what Geoffrey said.
        Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

        StyleZeitgeist Magazine

        Comment

        • ambrosian
          Senior Member
          • Dec 2012
          • 180

          #5
          ^ Totally missed that. Oops.
          street goth extraordinaire

          Comment

          • Blackman
            Member
            • Feb 2011
            • 63

            #6
            Geoffrey, reading your post are the best. always informative, always inspiring.

            Comment

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