It never hurts to go back to your roots. Over his five years at Emilio Pucci, Peter Dundas has soaked in the house's Italian jet-set heritage and turned the show into one of Milan's hot tickets. But tonight Dundas tapped into his own history, and the result ranks up there with his best collections for Pucci. Dundas has Norwegian blood in his veins. His granny's hand-knits inspired the chunky fringed sweaters here. He was a hockey player way back when, and his old uniform got a second life in black jerseys whipstitched in leather. And all manner of cold-weather outerwear was reimagined in super-luxe fur: A tribal blanket pattern was intarsia'd along the hem of an orange fox chubby, and mink was collaged on the sleeves of a pony-hair parka lined in beaver and lambswool.
Northern vibe though there was, the collection remained identifiably Pucci. The label's familiar prints were front and center at the top of the show on minidresses overprinted with Appaloosa horse patterns and heavily studded in silver. And they reappeared at the end on a pair of chiffon gowns stitched in a gold-thread ikat pattern. Jersey was another house signature, but back in Emilio's day it never draped quite as fabulously as it did on Joan Smalls, who wore a long brown dress that dipped precipitously in the back from crisscrossing gold chains.
In the end, though, this collection's most lasting images didn't have much to do with Dundas' Nordic lineage or Pucci's jet-set past. For all the dressmaking Dundas does here, he has stealth skills as a tailor. A pair of velvet pantsuits cut rakishly in glorious shades of ruby and emerald green put that talent in the spotlight.
