Gareth Pugh

Gareth Pugh
Gareth Pugh, May 2007.
Born	1981 Sunderland
Nationality	English
Education	City of Sunderland College, Central Saint Martins
Label	Gareth Pugh

Gareth Pugh (born 1981 in Sunderland) is an English fashion designer. He currently lives and works in London.

Career

Pugh's trademark inflated clothing.

At 14, Pugh began working as a costume designer for the English National Youth Theatre. He started his fashion education at City of Sunderland College and finished his degree in Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in 2003. His final collection at St. Martins, which used balloons to accentuate models' joints and limbs (a technique that would become one of his trademarks), attracted that attention of the senior fashion editor of Dazed & Confused magazine, who placed one of his designs on the magazine's cover shortly thereafter. Pugh was selected to participate in British reality show The Fashion House two months after his graduation, which he would later call "horrible" and his "only other option [to being on] the dole." The rise of !WOWOW!, a feature in Dazed & Confused, and a debut show at London club Kashpoint's Alternative Fashion Week brough Pugh to the attention of Fashion East "London's breeding ground for cutting-edge new talent," leading them to invite Pugh to participate in its Autumn 2005 group show. Pugh had only four weeks, with no studio, no assistants, and little money, to create the collection. His collection ended up a critical success and attracted significant attention to his designs.

Pugh's solo premiere was in London's Fall 2006 fashion week; he has since showed his Spring 2007 and Autumn 2007 collections there. Pugh's shows have continued to draw critical praise. British Vogue, for instance, called his Spring 2007 collection "an incredible, unmissable show" and said that "his genius is undeniable." Anna Wintour is a notable supporter of Pugh's designs.

Aesthetic

Style.com describes Pugh as the "latest addition to a long tradition of fashion-as-performance-art that stretches back through Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Vivienne Westwood to the eighties club culture of Leigh Bowery." Pugh's collections are autobiographical rather than referential, and draw inspiration from Britain's extreme club scene. Pugh's trademark is his experimentation with form and volume. He often uses "nonsensically shaped, wearable sculptures" to "distort[] the human body almost beyond recognition." Elements in his designs include PVC inflated into voluminous coats, black and white patchwork squares, Perspex discs linked like chain mail, and shiny latex masks and leggings; he has used materials including mink, parachute silk, foam footballs, afro-weave synthetic hair, and electrically charged plastic in his clothing. Pugh describes his designs as being "about the struggle between lightness and darkness, like Nancy Kerrigan versus Tonya Harding. I find it amazing how ice-skating is this incredibly elegant art form and then there's this one pikey, trailer-trash skater who's a real bitch and has her opponent kneecapped. Also people like Gary Glitter, this old glam rock singer who turns out to be a pedophile."

Pugh's Spring 2007 collection also featured somewhat more wearable clothing, like this dress.

Commercial potential

Though he is currently a darling of the fashion elite, Pugh claimed in March 2007 that he had yet to sell a single dress and that he struggled to make ends meet. (It is to be noted that until his Spring 2007 collection, his clothes were solely catwalk experiments and simply unavailable to purchase.) While constructing his autumn 2005 debut collection, shown in the Fashion East group show, he was squatting in a converted warehouse. (A court order ultimately forced him to leave the building.) He says his current studio is unheated and has only two electrical outlets. It remains to be seen whether Pugh can be a commercial success as well as a critical one, but he is slowly shifting to more wearable clothing in his runway shows and he has partnered with major manufacturers to produce some of his new pieces.

External links

• http://www.garethpugh.net/ - Official site.
• Gareth Pugh collections at style.com
• http://www.showstudio.com/projects/fashoff/ - Biographical films, performance films, catwalk shows.
• "Gareth Pugh Fashion Show at the V&A, June 2007". Fashion, Jewellery & Accessories. Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 2007-08-05.