London transplants to the Paris calendar couldn’t be more different than Giles Deacon and Gareth Pugh, who presented their collections yesterday. Deacon, who made a blazing début last fall with a Lolita-goes-to-college collection showed up this season with bourgeois irony zipped and snapped onto Grade A Brazilian meat: Victoria’s Secret models. The show was about volume, with full skirts and big, blown-out hair on swimsuit edition bodies and the occasional out-size headpiece. Day looks were beige with some pieces looking half dressed – or half undressed; satin lingerie bodices emerging from nude palette drapery. Evening was frosted over with gilt thread, full of skirts puffed out with vertically stacked fabric slices. Pugh – though he left the medieval warrior wear in the dungeon – stuck to his roots with quilted leather rock elements and cut-away transparency. The designer who started the video-défilé trend last fall with a stunning Nick Knight stop-edit piece bucked expectations again with signature gender confusion and lacerated fabrics – not to mention the number of men’s looks doing the circuit.
Gareth Pugh, 3 March, Palais de Tokyo
Giles Deacon, 3 March
