The runway music for Prabal Gurung’s Fall ‘11 collection: “Addicted to Love”—as interpreted by Florence + the Machine. It was a deliberate choice. For his Fall offering, Gurung channeled one of amour’s great addicts, the lovelorn Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations. “It’s a book that I was given when I was probably 6 or 7 years old,” the designer explains. “At that time I was kind of unclear about who she was—she’s a crazy old lady, that’s what I thought. As I got older and kept going back to it, [I found that] there’s something extremely, extremely sad, but all of us can somehow relate to her. There’s something beautifully melancholic and romantic about giving everything up for love, giving so much.” The result: a catwalk full of runway girls imagined as young, still hopeful but already fraying Havishams.
The character lives again—just in time for the collection to hit stores—in the new branding images Gurung created for the first time with photographer Daniel Jackson, model Julia Saner, and his longtime stylist, Tiina Laakkonen. The images, debuting exclusively on Style.com, are not quite a campaign and will run online-only, but the designer doesn’t rule out print ad spots at some time in the future. “For a new company like mine, the media budget is very limited,” he explained. “The resources that are online for free—Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr—it’s extremely crucial that we use those tools. These images [will] get picked up in China, picked up in random places traditional media would never reach.”
—Matthew Schneier
Photos: Daniel Jackson / Courtesy of Prabal Gurung
