The actress Dominique Fishback wore Prabal Gurung’s crystal-trimmed sky-blue tulle showstopper to the virtual Judas and the Black Messiah premiere earlier this month, almost a year after it appeared in his fall 2020 show. It’s the kind of gown that would’ve normally had a much shorter trip from the runway to the red carpet. Of course, this hasn’t been a normal year. Gurung hasn’t presented a collection since last February. In hindsight, that Rainbow Room show feels bittersweet and maybe even a little bit prescient: a send-off for old-school, unrestricted glamour just weeks before the pandemic shut everything down.
Except that Gurung hasn’t said goodbye to glamour. His new collections (he’s presenting pre-fall and fall here) came together over the summer. We were deep into the crisis and living with a lot of uncertainty, but he found reasons for optimism in the exuberant outdoor dance scenes springing up around New York City, from the piers of the Upper West Side down to Sheridan Square, and in the sidewalk restaurant set-ups that spilled everywhere onto the streets. “I was biking from uptown to downtown and seeing trans artists and drag artists vogueing in ’80s prom dresses...the joy and hope reminded me of why I came to New York 20 years ago,” he remembered on a Zoom call.
You won’t see any of the work-from-home clothes you’ve been hearing so much about here. Though Gurung has made accommodations for the way we’re living and spending now—separates instead of dresses, humble cotton in place of fancy silks, and tea lengths rather than trains—he’s channeled a lot of the energy, and some of the abandon, he witnessed last summer into his new clothes. The palette is all juicy reds and pinks, balanced with black and white polkadots, and there are flowers to beat the band. His dresses look like the love children of Emanuel Ungaro and Betsey Johnson. “I felt alive, I felt awake,” Gurung said, thinking back to last summer. Call him Mr. Feelgood.
