Prabal Gurung Sees the Light

Prabal Gurung Sees the Light

A few days ago in his showroom, Prabal Gurung was fitting the last pieces of his fall collection, the follow-up to a spring show that seemed to mark a turning point in his young career.

“I am a little more confident in my own skin,” he said. “I’m more confident, not only as a designer, but a person. I realized there are two sides to my life. There is the darkness, and the lightness, of myself.”

I told him he was starting to sound like Donna Karan.

But Mr. Gurung indeed seemed confident, or unconcerned, anyway, about the pressure he faced today at his noontime show. That is because the collection reflected his journey as a designer, “from hell to heaven,” as he said.

“I felt like I was in a place where I can slowly give a sense of myself in the collection,” he said.

He started with all-black looks shown on models with dark hair, and ended with all-white looks shown on models with blond hair. The former included dresses with sheer panels inset at the sides, a stiff sweatshirt embroidered with black roses over a kicky skirt, and a black dress superimposed with panels of a shiny neoprene print of an oil spill.

The latter included dresses composed of bits of gold foil, cutaway tulle inserts and strips of sequins, and a gown of gold lamé with cutouts at the sides. The idea was to give the idea of a halo effect (assuming that his customers pray daily at the altar of Equinox).

I was glad to have seen Mr. Gurung’s prints and accessories up close, for there were some hidden surprises. One image, framed in a border of gold roses, was of an enlarged cow’s skull, inspired by the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. The accessories for Mr. Gurung’s show, made by Fenton, included cuffs and large chokers affixed with what appeared on the runway to be scarabs, but were actually small cow skulls as well. The sunglasses, made by Linda Farrow, were based on a mirror image of the Wayfarer, with a small rose thorn in each corner of the frames.