Great designers’ greatness is stamped on our memory by the signature codes they leave behind them. Hence, when other designers succeed the house’s founder, they face a challenge: a delicate wrestle between the codes they have signed up to inherit and the urge to express their own point of view. Their own codes, in fact. Today Fausto Puglisi cleverly sucked the tension out of that dialectic by focusing on Emanuel Ungaro’s joyfully frothy output of the late ’60s and early ’70s. It was a neat little maneuver; by sidestepping Ungaro-in-his-’80s-pomp for Ungaro juvenilia, Puglisi had something new to play with.
As the mood board demonstrated, Ungaro in the ’60s was a man of his time—and a designer whose years working at Balenciaga and most powerfully at Courréges could be seen in his work. Puglisi chose to focus on a set of sweetly provocative floral macramé looks, all froth and of-that-era liberation touched with a softened Space Age futurism.
Impressively, Puglisi re-established a connection with the Swiss factory that made Ungaro’s ’60s pieces to create a wonderfully psychedelic lace macramé of ochre flowers and paisley petals used in his last capelet—teamed with matching thigh-highs—and a long loose skirt. The netted-check that ran throughout the collection, even down to the weave of the pressed-foam ruffles that edged many of these looks, appeared to be lifted from a pair of pants one of the mood board images showed Ungaro fitting on Twiggy. A harder, more Puglisi-ish preoccupation—Faustian?—expressed itself in the ringlet bonding on black vinyl and hot pink skirts, and as suspension on floral-scattered bustiers. “A little bit bondage, maybe, but also . . . romantic?” Puglisi ventured backstage; we had a laugh at that. This is not a collection for wallflowers or delicate petals—but for a woman in search of punchy, in-your-face prettiness, it will have allure.
