Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Digital Catwalk: Thrifty and Nifty use of New Media Formats

Gareth Pugh is known for futuristic fashion and has sent warrior women (complete with gray painted faces) down the runway last Fall—emphasizing shoulders and rigidity. This season he upped the shock factor by not sending girls down the runway at all!

Pugh instead used technology as a means to heighten creative control over his conceptual images and prerecorded a single girl soldiering across an amorphous atmosphere. Pugh would be remiss in allowing the Fashion World to pigeonhole him as a sci-fi designer. So he further embraced the space age feeling some buyers were noticing and Digitalized Design, deleting the actual catwalk in favor of a show resembling an experimental film.

By projecting a flatscreeen video of the looks in his Fall 09 collection Pugh told style.com reporter Tim Blanks he aimed to show that his insipiration is: "not from a spaceship, it's from under the ground. I wanted it to feel earthy." Earthy? Perhaps. Images of jet-black bleeding ink flow effortlessly into images of his floor-dusting triangular dresses. That fludity does echo an organic call; ironic that pioneering technological advances would “unleash [the] primordial” according to the well-respected eye of Blanks. Earthy was achieved, but in an unconventional sense of the word.

I cannot help but wonder if Valerie Steele of Fashion Insitutue of Technology was on to something when she noted that the image feast Pugh presented was "a fraction of the cost of a 100,000 show."

Whether Pugh strives to control image and emphasis movement of his garments or simply save money, his show sparked audiences to reflect on the times in a broader way than usually achieved at Fashion Weeks of the past.

While Pugh has always soaked up media attention for his revolutionary visions, it is his brave movement toward this new format he used to present his designs that sets him apart this season. Now his content and context match. Coordination of such factors is tres chic and perhaps will spur older Design Houses to follow suit?

The trend of using technology as a tool is commonplace in younger generations (whose propensity for multi-tasking and forward thinking is highly documented in psychological studies). Compare this to the older generations and Design Houses who are more likely to respond to economic times by regurgitating past cultural responses. For example the immediate trend of 1940's dressings reverting to the closest war era as the point of reference bores consumers. We crave different. For newer designers (Pugh) to deliver this in a fiscally responsible and fashion-forward way marks a truly progressive time.
Posted by Kayla at 8:28 AM