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For a long time, few within the fashion industry knew what to make of Gareth Pugh. Was he an artist using the catwalk as a vehicle through which to express his aesthetic? Or was he a fashion designer with such a limited budget that knitting with rubbish sacks
and making dresses out of balloons was the only option?
Some of his earliest work included a not-so-little black dress with cellophane-fringed shoulders that appeared almost a full metre wide, and an equally oversized illuminated coat that glowed with pinpricks of light, all wired up inside. Most famously, Pugh designed a catsuit created to mimic the silhouette of a giant poodle, straight out of the dog-grooming parlour. Its ears were made out of condoms.
One thing was certain: there was considerable buzz surrounding this young designer, both in and outside the insider circles. Pugh, with his slight frame, alabaster skin and fine features, was the driving force of a London club scene that hadn't been so energised since the halcyon days of the legendary nightspot Taboo. The more accessible face of this group of friends was model Agyness Deyn. The two remain friends and frequently share fish and chip dinners, apparently.
Pugh also shot to fame and a degree of notoriety as an integral part of !WOWOW! a creative community of artists who lived in a squat in Peckham, south London, and were as impenetrable to outsiders as they were glamorous.
Remarkably, and despite the fact that the style and fashion press couldn't get enough of his work, until 18 months ago, the designer hadn't done anything so banal as sell a stitch of clothing. He had dressed Kylie for her Showgirl tour, and Marilyn Manson.
Although Pugh's collections are aimed at women, his designs are sometimes shown on men - not for any self-consciously subversive, gender-bending reason, he claims, but because "male models are just cheaper". Given that Pugh is an extrovert, famed, on occasion, for an extreme personal style, he has often been compared to Leigh Bowery. His dark aesthetic, uncompromising vision and evident raw talent also leads, inevitably, to parallels being drawn between himself and Alexander McQueen.
"When new designers emerge, people always judge them by the values that they know," says the photographer Nick Knight, who has worked closely with Pugh almost since the day the latter graduated from Central Saint Martins (art and design college) in 2003.
"That's because it's quite difficult to see them as something apart from that. Gareth provides a very surreal and personal vision of the world and that's not easy to define."
"I think Gareth is interesting because people don't quite understand what he's doing," confirms Jefferson Hack, publisher of Dazed & Confused, the magazine that championed Pugh's degree collection on its cover only months after he graduated.
"When I first saw Gareth's work, I knew that I loved it and I obviously felt confident in his ability, otherwise I wouldn't have put it on the front of the magazine so early on. I presumed, though, that he would probably end up showing once a year, maybe in a gallery, and produce a limited edition of 10 pieces, say, that might sell for 50,000 [$134,000] each. Now, though, it's becoming clearer and clearer how important a designer he is and what his place in fashion might be."
If ever proof of that fact were needed, it came this year when Pugh was awarded The Andam (Association Nationale pour le Developpement des Arts de la Mode) international fashion award. Supported by the French Government as well as the Pierre Berge Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, the LVMH Group, Swarovski, Yves Saint Laurent (Gucci Group) and more, it ensures that 152,000 ($322,000) will be injected into his label. It is the largest prize in fashion and Pugh follows in a long line of highly respected Andam-supported fashion designers, including the Belgian Martin Margiela and the Dutch-born Viktor & Rolf. Most importantly, Pugh showed this season in Paris, not London, alongside fashion's biggest names.
London Fashion Week has been good to this designer but it remains a kindergarten by comparison.
When I arrive at Pugh's studio in Dalston, east London, at 10.30am as planned, I am greeted by an assistant who tells me that, actually, I must wait outside for a minute or two. "I think," he whispers, "Gareth might be asleep".
A self-proclaimed night creature, Pugh prefers to work and play into the small hours rather than to get up with the birds. He eventually surfaces, somewhat bleary-eyed, dressed in skinny jeans torn at the knee, a grey sweat top and white trainers.
Save for a billboard-sized photograph by the artist Matthew Stone propped up against one wall, the space is un-mannered to the point where it seems almost industrial. There's nothing as fey as inspiration boards loaded with whimsical reference pictures. In one corner, though, is the immediately identifiable head of the aforementioned poodle. Decapitated.
On closer inspection, this high-impact piece reveals the quieter and significant side of this designer's work. The sheer scale and audacity of it almost undermines the attention to detail and rigorous workmanship that went into its creation. As on another occasion, when what looks like a huge, hooded, black and white printed coat comes down Pugh's catwalk - it turns out that it is, in fact, patchwork, and that every small square has been sewn on to the surface of the garment by hand.
"You know, I spend three months working on the show and I end up with 15 outfits," says Pugh.
Gareth Pugh, 27, was born in Sunderland, in the north of England.
His father and elder brother, both called Trevor ("my parents were being very imaginative there") are policemen.
"I don't think that anyone ever thought there was a possibility that I might do that!" Pugh says.
Aged 10, Pugh's mother, Lesley, took her son down to London to see The Phantom of the Opera for his birthday treat. "It was in the West End and I remember walking through Soho and it was just so different. It was much sleazier back then, girls sitting on stools in the street and every other one of what are now coffee shops was a knocking shop or whatever. I thought: `Oh my God, that's amazing. This is somewhere that I really want to be."
Since the age of 8, Pugh had been taking ballet lessons ("like Billy Elliot"), but at 16 he had to choose between a career in dance or fine art - he opted for the latter. His interest in fashion was fuelled by one summer spent in London working in the costume department of the National Youth Theatre.
Pugh left school with straight As in fine art sculpture, photography and sociology. "I wanted to do textiles but I did sociology because of my mum and dad. They wanted me to have an `ology'. At the end of the day, it did me the world of good because it's interesting. You find out a little bit more about how things are interlinked."
"When I got to Saint Martins on my first day, the people on the course were so different to me. A lot them had done their foundation course there, everybody seemed to know each other, they were like `mwah, mwah, how was your summer?' I felt really out of place."
That didn't stop him being the star of his year, however.
"Very few people get the opportunity to continue what they're doing at college for a job. Because I don't think anyone there dreams of a job on the high street. So many people leave with huge aspirations and then have to go, 'okay, what can I do with them?"'
What Pugh did was immerse himself in the culture of !WOWOW!
"When you leave college it's tempting to expect something to be handed to you, but it wasn't like that. It was like a decision had to be made: do I get a job, or just stick it out and see what comes?"
The turning point came, he says, when Kylie Minogue's stylist, William Baker, turned up with a bag of black fabric and asked Pugh to transform it into a showpiece outfit. "It was a tiny paper bag, but the fabric inside was worth 1500 [$4000]. I started Kylie in the squat and had to finish it in the living room of a pub landlord who let me use his house because we'd been kicked out."
"I remember when I first met Gareth," says Nick Knight, who has worked on several projects with the designer, both for i-D and Dazed & Confused magazines, and for his fashion website, showstudio.com. "Nicola [Formichetti creative director of Dazed & Confused] brought him along to this thing we were doing for Showstudio, where people sent in clothes and stylists from across the board customised them. Gareth and Kylie's troupe of dancers wore them."
Knight invited Pugh to contribute a performance of his own. "He did this series where he would come in one day and be transformed into a very convincing show poodle on a rotating gold stand with a big red rosette on him. The entire next day he spent making a stack of cards. He piled up these cards and invariably they would fall down or if he'd get to the top, he'd start over again. Finally, he did something called `Make-up-Athon' where he sat in front of a mirror and made up looks for himself. He'd cover himself in treacle, then jam, then cream, making himself up as a cake, then he'd stick a candle into his nose and light it. He did look, after look, after look. It was very taxing and we ended up with this extreme and surrealistic cabaret."
In the meantime, for his day job, if you will, Pugh continued to design clothes, finally producing garments to sell in partnership with west-coast American designer Rick Owens and his wife, Michelle Lamy. His current autumn/winter collection was produced, for the most part, in specialist factories in Italy and is available at only the most upmarket and innovative stores around the world - Browns in London, Colette in Paris, Seven, Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman in New York. A single piece sells for thousands and only the most open-minded and confident women are ever likely to wear them.
"Gareth follows in a line of people whose extreme personal visions take you to a different universe," says Knight. "It's like Galliano, Yohji Yamamoto, Lee [Alexander McQueen] or Vivienne Westwood.
"I think that now he's also becoming more focused in his vision and we're seeing him dealing with the problem of designing clothes in a more direct and succinct way.
"What will be interesting is to discover what happens when he gets a large amount of money behind him. The ability of a designer to make women attractive and transform his or her own feelings into clothes that are very different from everybody else's is unusual and important. I'm sure Gareth has that."
- INDEPENDENT
