For almost three decades, Gareth Pugh has been a beloved name in British fashion. When he first appeared with his early collections during London Fashion Week in the mid-00s, it felt like he was singlehandedly revitalising the city’s scene with his over-the-top and bonkers creations. In his own words, he made clothing that was “never meant to make its way to a rail.”

Now, for his latest collaboration with Resident Choreographer of the Royal Ballet, Wayne McGregor, Pugh has produced the costumes for MADDADDAM, a three-act balletic interpretation of Margaret Atwood’s novel trilogy of the same name. Set after a man-made apocalypse, where pigs have been bred with humans and a few survivors are trying to rebuild society, it is a characteristically huge and complex work from McGregor, aided in its total brilliance by Pugh’s exceptional costumes. Naturally, we had to get Gareth Pugh to give us a tour through the wardrobe.

Barry Pierce: It’s been a couple of years since I have read the MaddAddam books but, from what I remember, they are full of characters and scenarios that, I imagine, would be incredibly difficult to translate to stage. How did you go about tackling these fairly ambitious books?
Gareth Pugh: Well, the books themselves are very rich, and they describe this whole world. But obviously, with the written word, we have only the description and this idea of what this world might look like. Wayne is never going to do something that is necessarily so narrative driven too. The work was commissioned in 2019 and basically, the whole premise of the book is that there’s been this “waterless flood”– it’s essentially a global pandemic. Obviously, we know what happened in 2020 so it was quite a strange environment to be addressing something that we’d all just gone through. Wayne never really gives me any restrictions with regard to what we can and can’t do. 

BP: Anyone who has read the books will have very distinct memories of the pigoons, which is what I presume we are looking at here.
GP: Yes, in the books, there’s a whole group of characters called pigoons – half pigs half humans – which they use to harvest human organs. So this idea of a big, kind of scary, bulbous shape, but represented on stage at a distance… It’s quite difficult to understand how to do that for dance, and obviously, the guys need to be able to move. We did quite a lot of work in the studio on this. They’ve got these big arm pieces that are supposed to be the pig legs, which are kind of worn as crutches and they have this amazing, almost animalistic way in which they move.

BP: You also have these fully armoured suits, almost like police combat armour. They’re incredibly menacing pieces.
GP: Again, in the books, there’s a group of police security called CorpSeCorp and we wanted to do something that felt quite armorial, quite foreboding. There’s an incredible moment in the ballet where there are about 25 of these guys lined up and projected onto the scrim at the front of the stage. This ballet is a melee of all these different elements, going from Max Richter’s score which is classical in moments but then becomes very hard techno, it’s a whole mix of things. It’s a multimedia approach to representing the work on stage.  

We worked a lot on these CorpSeCorp costumes to make something that looks and feels tough but is very danceable, which is always quite a challenge. You can’t have costumes that interfere with dancers’ feet, for obvious reasons. My first project with Wayne, which was back in 2011, Carbon Life, the first thing we started on was this quite ridiculous shoe that Wayne loved and the dancers loved but there was a lot of conversation around safety because if you put something on a dancer and expect them to do what they do in it and if it isn’t safe and they fuck up their feet, they’re out!

BP: How many costumes are there for the whole ballet?
GP: It’s a big cast, there are about fifty dancers. And, a principle doesn’t remain the same character all the way through, they morph and become other things. When we did the first premiere in Toronto, there was a lot that we made and then didn’t use, because the work was still being formed. Now that we’re in London, we’ve had a chance to rework the whole thing. All of the costumes have been remade, many of the costumes looked very different in Toronto and not necessarily for the best. But I was working remotely for that whole process. Being able to revisit these costumes and make them better has been a really nice thing to do.

BP: You’ve been one of Wayne’s most fruitful partnerships, how many projects have you done together now?
GP: Well, the first thing we did was Carbon Life, which was a ballet he did with Mark Ronson and it had a whole host of live performances and singers on stage, like Alison Mosshart and Boy George. I was showing in Paris at the time and Wayne asked me to do both set and costume and it was the first time I’d ever really done something like that. He threw me in the deep end a bit, doing the set design for the Main Stage at the Royal Opera House. [laughs] But we’ve done projects at the Paris Opera and we’ve done other things in London. We also worked a lot on my own shows. We did a show in New York, I think it was SS15, where we did a big presentation with these huge-scale video works of Wayne and his dancers that were filmed in the months before the show. On the night, Wayne came back with his dancers and did a live performance – it was beautiful. 

“I get bored very easily and I think it’s the same with Wayne. He is constantly challenging things, he’s always excited to do something that feels wrong or a little left-field.”

BP: You and Wayne are very clearly drawn to each other, there’s something there that works. What do you think that is?
GP: We just have this curiosity, this excitement for new things. We both like to push ourselves and challenge ourselves, never feeling comfortable or safe. I get bored very easily and I think it’s the same with Wayne. He is constantly challenging things, he’s always excited to do something that feels wrong or a little left-field. Within the context of the Royal Opera House, I think it’s amazing that he’s been given this platform for his work because it’s very confrontational. It’s not The Nutcracker. [laughs] But it’s so important that such an establishment is open to presenting this work because it’s important for art to progress. 

BP: Do you feel that’s how you’d also describe your attitude back when you were showing at Fashion Week? Confrontational? Constantly challenging?
GP: That was always my reason. I left college in 2003 and the reason I went to study fashion, really, was because London was the epicentre of so many incredible things and fashion was very much a part of that. It was incredibly exciting and there were so many talented people showing here. But then when I left college, they’d all fucked off. All of the big London names, Hussein Chalayan, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, they all went to Paris and it just felt like there wasn’t a huge amount of things going on. That wasn’t what I’d signed up for. So, when I got my opportunity through Fashion East to show, I took it and ran with it and used it to remind myself, and other people, what Fashion Week should be about. A lot of people didn’t like it but if you’re pleasing everybody then you’re doing something wrong. I never started the brand to be a business. I still don’t really have much of a plan, but I think that’s the best way to go about things.

BP: You see with a lot of young designers in London now that if they haven’t set the brand up to be a business from the very beginning, they end up folding quite quickly.
GP: I think there’s a duty of care from certain bodies, like the Vogue Fashion Fund or the British Fashion Council, to support designers. It’s really hard when you’ve got no money, you’ve got no support, you’ve got no studio, and then you’re asked to make a collection. I think that’s slightly irresponsible. Back in the day, when I first got asked to stage a runway, I was asked on the 5th of January to do a show for the middle of February. They gave me six weeks. But, you do with those opportunities what you want. I understand why things have tightened up a bit but it does really take the air out of things. I think people should be allowed to make mistakes and not be so scared of fucking things up. 

“I think people should be allowed to make mistakes and not be so scared of fucking things up”

BP: It’s funny because I think many really idolise the era when you started showing in London. The mid-00s feel like a golden era now.
GP: I mean, my first studio was in a squat. I was very hand-to-mouth and I was very lucky when I met some people who were able to help me. When I first met Michelle Lamy, she took me under her wing and showed me how I should be doing things. It wasn’t always necessarily the way to do it but meeting her and Rick and having a support network really helped. I would not have been able to continue solo. And it’s important to remember that, you can’t do everything yourself. 

BP: Would you ever be enticed to go back on the schedule?
GP: I mean, I would never say no. I’m not sure I’d want to do it in the same way that I was doing it before. There was a huge push on the commercial aspect of what we were doing. I won the ANDAM Award in 2008 and went to show in Paris and that was hugely expensive. When that happened, we had to somewhat flip gears and think about actually sustaining the brand and making money. That was…interesting. The collections I had made in London were not commercial at all and having to think about both shows and commerciality was very challenging. It was like I could be the designer and then someone else could look after the commercial collection, I was doing it all. So I wouldn’t say never, but I’d only do it for the right reasons. 

MADDADDAM is on the Main Stage of the Royal Opera House until November 30th. Tickets can be booked through the Royal Ballet & Opera website.