When I first watched a Gareth Pugh show I realised it was okay to want to be a building. I also immediately understood that I was born in the wrong century, began reading my father’s New Scientist, and avidly dreamt of inventing a working time machine that would take me to a future era where everybody dressed in latex, masks, and harlequin squares arranged in bizarre (and painful to wear) configurations. I was sixteen, deeply impractical, and had never seen anything quite like his designs.

Pugh’s work has variously been described as monochromatic, angular, geometric, and apocalyptic. The models wearing his clothes look awkward – oppressed by the architectural designs that they carry, not wear. His early shows are the clearest example of this, with the designs swamping and extending the frail bodies underneath them. There’s a reason why much of Pugh’s work is labeled ‘unwearable.’ In Pugh’s Spring/Summer 2007 collection the faces of the models are obscured by impenetrable black masks, and the clothes they wear look as though they have been built around them, with cuboid shoulders and angular shapes hiding the natural curves of their bodies. They look as though they are carrying fragments of the city on their shoulders.

Pugh’s early designs show a human  body fundamentally at unease with its urban environment, so why do they appeal to us? This is because his work is only apocalyptic if the apocalypse is interpreted with total optimism, as an unspecified future event of radical change where the relationship between the human body and its environment has been transformed – where an organic connection between city and self has been achieved. The fabrics and textures represent both transience and permanence, evoking the solidity of the skyscrapers that surround us and the delicacy of the objects that appear and disappear in the urban debris. Let’s not forget that underlying sense of humour, however – notably, Pugh recently created a series of headpieces by inflating condoms and imitating the shapes that appeared. He told the Independent that the inspiration came from ‘the idea of creating something permanent from something that would normally be here today and gone tomorrow.’ His work gives all aspects of the city validity, and gestures towards a future where we truly inhabit the spaces we live in.

Yet Pugh’s work also effects a reconciliation of old and new. In 2011, Pugh made his Italian debut in Florence with Pitti Immagine, projecting a film into the ceiling of a 14th century church. His collection is inspired by Florentine art and religious iconography but firmly locates these within modernity. His angels sport plastic, rectangular wings, and a robotic model is duplicated over and over again, associating Medici gold with the factory production line. Through his fashion films, as well as in his main lines, Pugh shows us a sci-fi future where technology can be beautiful and the city spiritual, and where the human body and architecture can each mirror the other. One day, perhaps, the teenager that lost hours pouring over Pugh's designs will find that future home.