There's something about dramatically asymmetric hems—and that thing is that they look vile. In the hands of Fausto Puglisi, however, that foully inharmonious shape acquired a certain disheveled, gladiatorial toughness. Perhaps the idea seemed acceptable because Puglisi himself is such an entertainingly "tells it like it is" designer. Take his POV on animal print (of which there was much, again, in this Pre-Fall collection): "Dolce does the best animal prints, but I love them too, and I wanted to do it in a graphic way. So I put them in my computer and destroyed them." Puglisi's remixed leaf-touched zebra and sampled leopard fought it out on circle skirts amputated above the knee, A-lines, and sweats. They roamed freest on the front panel of a marvelous crepe dress with a leg-flash slash Angelina Jolie was made for. Puglisi's particular-woman silhouettes played host to a romp of graphic squares; Romanesque reliefs; Sicilian-tooled, vaguely pagan hardware; and his queasy and querulously unignorable palette of brightly clashing pastels. If you like Puglisi, then you will like this. "I love my customers, and when I think about my collection I think about what these women want," he said. "They want to be beautiful, they want to be sexy, and they want to be amazing." For a certain girl, Puglisi is the answer.
