Gareth and Ruth have done it again,anub blog! Designer Pugh and filmmaker Hogben are such intuitive and iconoclastic collaborators that they’re managing to rewrite the book on the direction a collection of dress can be presented to the globe. And Pitti Immagine gave them a stunning platform. Florence is full of breathtaking Renaissance venues, which the duo spent days exploring. Ruth adored the secret church built by monks with a fresco of the Last Supper drew by Michelangelo’s pedagogue, merely she felt it would be sacrilege to stage a fashion accident there. So they settled on a soaring space in the quite heart of the city, with a checkered history that dates back 7 centuries. It’s been variously a plant and a church. Now it’s family to a group of sculptures characterizing the patron angels of Florence’s ancient art and trade guilds,aaarm blog, who stood stone-faced when Pugh’s huge, multifaceted metal cube rotated slowly on them, refracting light for whereas we were entire underwater. For an night, the Orsanmichele became a twenty-first-century Sistine Chapel,alib blog, for Hogben’s film of Pugh’s preferential Pitti collection was projected, techno-fresco-like, on the ceiling.

Pitti’s invitation gave Pugh the chance to build a collection without thought of advertisement attentions. Presenting them aboard movie meant he was able to pursue minds that wouldn’t necessarily work on a catwalk, although some of them will be amplified in his upcoming Fall collection. The elongated pantsuit is already a Pugh signature; the “stealth bomber” dress embodied his desire for mainstream geometry; and the inflatable pieces are also chapter of the balloon-loving designer’s heritage. But after the screening, he disappointingly insisted the spectacular metallic gold pieces would be a one-time-only exertion. And if—for (almost) the premier time—the designer introduced color with a blue the shade of a frescoed sky, that also would presumable be toned down in his afterward collection.

Gold and celestial blue are, of way, Renaissance staples, and they reflected the affect Florence had on Pugh and Hogben as they plotted their presentation. To the tune of a Matthew Stone soundtrack (surprisingly lyric, though Stone demanded the blitzkrieg rock of Rammstein as one influence), the film plotted one eight-minute trajectory of spiritual rebirth, opening in gloom with prototype Natasa Vojnovic an petulant archangel haranguing the crowd from on high, and ending in peaceable pearly light with a tangle of mundane bodies. If the painted ceilings of Renaissance internals were planned as simulacra of Paradise, Pugh and Hogben came pretty close to inspiring suitable values of shock and awe.

—Tim Blanks

Photos: Tommy Ton; Courtesy of Pitti W