Best Of 2017: Nick Knight Shoots Gareth Pugh’s Autumn 2017 Collection

Then the “unspeakable happened” in America in November last year and he who was elected was elected, Gareth Pugh and his partner Carson McColl were in Washington to witness it all. But from a bad thing came a good thing: the idea for Pughs’s London smash autumn show was born. This had now become a matter of protest.

Trump’s stance on, well, just about everything, including of course, his appalling attitude to immigrants and gay people, made Pugh want to do something different for his show. “At that point after the American election, it just felt like we should use our platform to be part of that political conversation,” he says over pints and gins in a pub in London.

This protest became one of the most- talked-about shows in the capital, not only because of the clothes you see here – they are incredible – but also the theatre. Not since the days of McQueen some 25 years ago has the press complained so much about one London show. It was, they said, “too dark”, “too cold” and “in the middle of nowhere”. All had been summoned by Pugh to an unfinished concrete venue shaped a bit like Shakespeare’s Globe, somewhere off Upper Street, Islington. Here, lines of blacked-out BMWs queued to drop off mouthy American department-store buyers and moaning old fashion birds. It was just like the old days, when shows were shows, which meant something new. “That place was a nightmare,” says Pugh. “It’s the only show where I’ve almost blacked out, like, five times, just from the sheer stress of it all. And the logistics of showing in an underground space that’s four stories down with no mobile-phone reception… ” Well, imagine.

Then there was the music. Pugh worked closely with the artist Matthew Stone to create a muscular staccato of Trumpisms. “Build that wall!” screamed the speakers cut to clash with a sprinkling of Madonna’s Erotica, some Dylan Thomas (read by Richard Burton) and guitar openers from Jimi Hendrix – and it wouldn’t stop. It. Would. Not. Stop. From one song to a political quote to another song – on and on and on and on. It was unnerving and annoying and incredible. It was also reminiscent of the music used by sinister government organisations to keep those being interrogated WIDE AWAKE. We’re now down four fights in a tomb-cum- theatre space with a few strip lights placed “every so often”. These, beautifully done, were courtesy of Lucy Carter, who has also created the lighting for Wayne McGregor, choreographer for the Royal Ballet.

All this and the clothes – we’ll get to those shortly – show Pugh at his absolute best, when the man pushes hard against the fashion system, weaving politics into cloth and annoying just about everybody. And in his mind always, he says, is London and what it stands for. If New York is commerciality and souped-up classics, Milan is commerce and mega brands. If Paris is your international-fashion showcase, then London is the wilful and precocious little sister. “For me, London is about youth and ideas and excitement and freshness,” says Pugh. But also commerciality. “We have a show and we have a showroom and we do like to separate those two things. We tick a lot of the boxes for commercial reasons, because we have to – it’s how we pay for the next season. The show is like parfum and the salesroom and shopping like eau de toilette. It’s just finding that balance between how you want to be seen and what you actually represent in a shop.”

None of this is easy, of course. “It’s always a difficult one for me. Our driving force isn’t the hanger in the store – that is just a happy by-product of the process we go through with the show,” he says. “It’s also quite a cancerous thing, this hanger mentality, because you can start to feel and think quite flat. It kind of kills me when people say they designed from Instagram and it’s all very, you know… ” And here Pugh politely trails off, so I’ll continue. The idea of a creative industry that is led purely by the sums – “X sold better than Y so let’s not produce Y again, but let’s do X in another colourway” – isn’t creativity at all: it’s design by rote. It’s looking on Instagram to see what yet another blogger wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt with “tricky sleeves” is wearing next. And surmising how those sunglasses, which happen to be perched on her head while she happens to not be posing yet posing for photos, are “terribly Jackie O, so let’s do some of them”. That’s not design, it’s bubbles. It’s blah and it’s got a nerve. You may as well be designing pegs – and I quite like pegs, but you know what I mean. It’s just basic-bitch pretty frocks and wedges.