Actress Dominique Fishback wore Prabal Gurung crystal blue tulle display to the brim Judah and the Black Messiah premiere earlier this month, almost a year after appearing in its fall 2020 show. This is the type of gown that would normally be on a much shorter trip from the runway to the red carpet. Of course, this was no ordinary year. Gurung has not released a collection since February last year. Looking back, that Rainbow Room show feels a bittersweet and maybe even a little prescient: put away for old school, unhurried glamor just weeks before the pandemic closed all nothing.
Except that Gurung has not left a blessing with glamor. His new collections (he’s present 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 hope in the eager outdoor dance scenes jumping up around New York City, from the piers of the Upper West down to Sheridan Square, and in the pavement restaurants spilled restaurants everywhere on the streets. “I was cycling from uptown to the city center and I saw trans artists and drag artists take on 80s prom dresses … the joy and hope reminded me why I came to New York 20 years ago, ”he recalled on Zoom.
You won’t see any clothes from home that you’ve been hearing so much about here. While Gurung has made places for how we live and spend now – split instead of dresses, humble cotton instead of supple silk, and lengths of tea rather than trains – it has a lot of energy put away, and some of the abandonment, he saw last summer in his new clothes. The palace is all red and pink, balanced with black and white polkadots, and there are flowers to accentuate the band. His dresses look like the beloved children of Emanuel Ungaro and Betsey Johnson. “I felt alive, I felt awake,” Gurung said, thinking back to last summer. He is called Mr. Feelgood.