Talk about a reboot! MSGM honcho Massimo Giorgetti made his debut as the creative director of Emilio Pucci today, presenting a group of clothes that he pointedly described not as a Resort collection but a “pilot episode.” “It’s like the pilot of Game of Thrones, the episode where you see this world, these characters, for the first time,” Giorgetti explained, as various members of the Pucci clan looked on. Which is worth mentioning, because it drove home the point that Giorgetti, like the GOT showrunners who are riffing on George R. R. Martin’s books, doesn’t get to make a world from scratch: The house of Emilio Pucci has been shopping its signature bold prints to the public since the 1940s. It’s a known quantity, a well-known quantity, in that respect. And the label took on a distinctly sexy identity over the course of Peter Dundas’ recently concluded term as its head. Today, Giorgetti did yeoman’s work reinterpreting the Pucci archive, dramatically shifting course from Dundas’ va-va-voom mode to something much, much quirkier in tone. To extend the TV series analogy: Imagine, if you will, if Lena Dunham were suddenly put in charge of writing and producing Scandal. That would be a very different show.
The first thing you noticed about Giorgetti’s Pucci woman was that she favors an eccentric proportion. There was a touch of off-ness to all the looks, whether an oversize, confetti-embroidered slipdress shown over a bright yellow silk button-down, or a laser-cut cotton coat idiosyncratically belted at the intersection of waist and hip. Giorgetti’s side-buttoned blouses—a tip of the hat to that Pucci stock-in-trade, the printed silk scarf—sat similarly awry on the body, while his one-shoulder deconstructed button-downs featured peculiar, elongated sleeves. Giorgetti has a sense of measure about the strange: His women didn’t look like oddballs, but rather like daughters of old money who boast a talent for the offhand. There was a certain haute bourgeois sensibility at play here that the Pucci family will no doubt appreciate: Giorgetti’s clothes were bright and bold, but they weren’t flashy. And as he pointed out, the core Pucci identity was maintained not only in prints, like the brushstroke that had been plumbed from the archive, but also in the palette that he’d seized on for new prints, of which there were many, and extrapolated into 3-D embellishments like a multicolor fringe. The house of Emilio Pucci has always had a taste for dissonance—unexpected color combinations and patterns that sear the eye. It was a canny move on Giorgetti’s part to pick up on that jolie laide quality and its underlying aristocratic hauteur. The only qualm, today, was that his take came off as perhaps a bit “cute.” Consider that a cliff-hanger for the next episode.
