Gareth Pugh brings his subversive creativity to the National Ballet

“How do you dress a pigoon, anyway?” This was among the existential questions pondered by designer Gareth Pugh, who was charged with costuming some of Margaret Atwood’s most ominous and vivid characters in “MaddAddam” for The National Ballet, which makes its world premiere on Nov. 23 in Toronto.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy “Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood” and “MaddAddam” and brought to life by choreographer Wayne McGregor, the three-act ballet is a co-production with The Royal Ballet in London. McGregor assembled a team of his frequent collaborators for the project, including Max Richter, who created an original score for the production.

“Wayne wants this to be a visual explosion on the stage, a chaos of colours and textures” says Pugh, from the Toronto lakeshore studio where the costumes are coming together as the production nears. There was, he says, “a huge amount of research and development into the costumes to allow for aggressive and frenetic movement, but also to change the way the dancers stand and react to the choreography.”

Pugh has been working on ideas, patterns and prototypes since last December, but he says that once they make it into rehearsals with McGregor and the dancers, they may all change again: “It’s a very fluid process.”

One of Pugh’s costuming goals is to allow audiences to easily identify groups of characters from the books. Take the CorpSeCorps, the private security operatives from “The Year of the Flood.” “We wanted them to be menacing folks,” says Pugh. “For ballet, we needed something that can take a beating and that people can move in. We found this incredible dirt bike/motor bike kind of armour, bought a load of it and stripped it all apart and rebuilt it.” Pugh paired the body armour with tubed face masks and clunky boots.

The costumes for God’s Gardeners, a religious sect of characters, have a monastic mood that still allows for movement. Pugh engineered a kind of circle of fabric that drapes “down the front of the neck and underneath the legs and up to the back of the neck, so it’s easy to dance in, and to partner in.” The circular hats, he says, give off the now-familiar Atwoodian vibe. “They are a gardener’s sun hat, paired with a nun’s wimple, a nod and a wink to the ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ made to work for the stage, for a progression of the silhouette.”

The High Priestess wears a gown, a wide silhouette with pleats; she also gets a special hat to stand out from the group. “There is a finite amount you can push the designs,” he says, noting that “The dancer’s health and safety is paramount.”

Pugh loves to play with metaphor and contrasts. For one character grouping, he turned to an old photo shoot of Brad Pitt for inspiration. “He’s quite big and masculine, but he’s wearing this little girl’s sequined dress so there is something unnerving about it. We leaned into the perverse masculinity.” That germ of an idea translated into what Pugh calls “these pastel Care Bear fake fur/My Little Pony garments paired with pit-bull face muzzles. It is a nice marriage of oddness.”

There is oddness, says Pugh, in his fashion designs, too. “Theatre has worked its way into the fashion work I do, that suspension of disbelief, the fantasy of illusion, that really does feed each other.” Pugh and McGregor have often worked together on Pugh’s fashion shows, so they are accustomed to interpreting each other’s ideas in different forms.

The duo’s first theatre collaboration was 2012’s “Carbon Life,” where Pugh created the sharp, angular architectural costumes for the dancers in McGregor’s choreography, all set to music by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt, with Boy George and Alison Mosshart performing live onstage.

But Pugh’s love of theatre goes back much farther than that. At just 14, he made his way to London from his native Sunderland to work in the costume department of the National Youth Theatre. “God loves a trier,” he says of his precocious first break in the fashion and theatre world. He was also a dancer himself, giving it up when he was 17. He went on to attend the famed MA program at Central Saint Martins, a school that has produced the biggest stars in British fashion, including Alexander McQueen and Phoebe Philo. A stint interning for Rick Owens was followed by the debut of Pugh’s own label at London Fashion Week in 2006.

For much of Pugh’s early career, his clothing — explorations of volume, often involving inflatable PVC and other forms of wearable sculpture, including Perspex made into chain mail, foam footballs and human hair — was created strictly for the runway and the fashion film format. These were, he says, statement art pieces, deliberately pushed too far to be practical or even possible to actually wear in real life. But on the stage, his performance pieces have appeared on Kylie Minogue, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.

Pugh decided to stop doing runway shows after the 2019 show season, a pre-pandemic call he now identifies as the choice that opened the door for creative projects such as this ballet. In fashion, he says, “I feel unsure where I fit into the landscape. Fashion can feel like a snake eating its own tail. This is a chance to stretch my legs, creatively. I turned 41 this year and it feels like I’m starting from scratch. My work in fashion has prepared me well, but this feels fresh and exciting.”

As for the pigoons, Pugh isn’t telling how they are going to look. We will have to wait for the premiere for the big reveal. They will no doubt walk an unsettling line between beauty and the grotesque, a place in the middle where Pugh says fantasy lies.

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