Top image: Still, Gareth Pugh SS18, dir. Nick Knight. 

How does one begin to sum up Gareth Pugh’s SS18 show? Barbaric, beautiful, claustrophobic, and indeed not really a show at all. Pugh has already subverted the traditional catwalk format multiple times this year, including creating  3D costumes for a futuristic adaptation of the Baroque opera Antigona and unveiling a short film prior to his FW17 collection. This season, working with Nick Knight as director, Pugh presented his collection as a short film, wanting to provide a ‘visceral, high impact experience that communicates the feeling of the collection with no holds barred’.

Showing at BFI IMAX – the largest cinema screen in the UK – the film began with two men – one the designer himself – sat opposite each other in suits as if in a showdown. Building on Pugh’s fascination with David Lynch (earlier this year he paid homage to Mulholland Drive with a short fashion film), clay and paint was smothered onto faces and bodies in surreal and jarring movements. The uncanny disfigurement of Francis Bacon’s portraits came to life, as disturbing additions to the human form detract from its natural beauty.

Wounds were opened in a barbaric destruction of the human form, unnerving the viewer and thrusting them into an alternate reality where all comfort was swiftly disposed of. The next scene saw dancers in the first pieces from the collection, beautiful and delicate yet tinged with fire. After the stifling atmosphere of the previous images the human form is briefly freed and enters the eye with a new intensity.

Then bodies moved closer together, their freedom from constraint hindered by the sheer quantity of dancers in such a small space. Pugh seems determined to demonstrate the multiple ways in which the body and clothing can become a cage, and the way in which the external world can obscure internal freedom. Further pieces resembled cocoons in their structure, referencing stifling structural pieces from previous collections, as cages encased bodies, restricting movement and the human form. The film played with light and reflections to signal the glimmers of freedom which are obstructed by the world in which his characters remain trapped: it is unclear whether pieces empower the characters like armour or imprison them, mirroring the nuance which is present in the daily struggle of existing as a conscious being facilitated by a body.

Staging the piece inside the IMAX further emphasised the point that this season for Pugh was not about convention or entertainment, but about pushing our perceptions to their limits and forcing the viewer to reevaluate the relationship between fashion and the body.