London-born design wunderkind Gareth Pugh presented his first menswear collection in Paris last night to a downpour of praise. With LVMH chief Bernard Arnault’s daughter Delphine Arnault as an unexpected guest, the Pugh buzz only heightened. As the heiress to the head of one of the world’s biggest fashion conglomerates, Delphine doesn’t trot out to see young designers often. Sure, she sat next to Karl Lagerfeld at the Dior Homme show, but she doesn’t trudge around Paris in the rain and wait for shows by 27-year-olds to start an hour late. (Kind of like you wouldn’t have expected to see Madonna at, say, a Santogold concert last year.) But trudge out she did, calling the collection “beautiful, amazing” as she pushed through the crowd to congratulate Pugh backstage.
The Telegraph’s Hilary Alexander notes the collection “left fashion critics decidedly short on superlatives.” Pugh told her he wanted to create the kind of things he would wear and wanted to see in stores, describing it as “wet” but “not wet in a sort of rebirth kind of way, but more of like an oily, dirty, more polluted kind of way.” So will LVMH scoop up Pugh to, as Alexander writes, “reignite a moribund menswear market”? We hope so because we find Pugh’s shows among the most exciting each season, and we’d love to see what he’d do with LVMH’s hearty funds (some are speculating he’ll be tapped for Dior Homme). Whatever happens, we’re glad Beyoncé and Jay-Z can wear Pugh together now. Wouldn’t they look so sweet?
Could London’s avant garde Gareth Pugh be in the LVMH sights? [Telegraph]
