British avant-garde designer Gareth Pugh should be in Paris, prepping for his Sept. 30 Spring 2010 show. Instead, Pugh hosted a film installation at the MAC & Milk Studios space on Sunday night.

   Gareth Pugh's installation

The film, directed by Ruth Hogben, is a four-vignette reverie on the elements and undercurrents of Pugh's newest collection. Last season, Pugh opted to present a video instead of a runway show, which Hogben also directed. The new films are projected onto four sides of a towering cube, and accompanied with a rumbling soundtrack not unlike the second coming of Stanley Kubrick's monolith in "2001."

But because Pugh is presenting a runway show this season this season, film freed him from having to show the clothing. "This is an amazing opportunity for me to communicate not the clothes but, rather, the ideas behind what we're going to be doing this season," the designer says.

"It's nice to be able to do something that is linked but completely removed from clothing," Pugh says. "With the catwalk show or anything having to do with clothing, it's quite restrictive in a sense because people want to see clothes. Whereas if you take that out of the equation and it's just the ideas, you can go to town with it -- creatively, at least."

So what are the themes of Pugh's newest collection? Nestled among the images of disintegrating angles, the Holy Trinity, an Icarus-like figure and a pale monarch, were themes of death before rebirth as well as visions of weightlessness. Against some of the lightness of the images, the soundtrack suggests ponderous weight, trains on tracks and dragging chains. But someone's Icarus may be someone's else hanging dancer; the film is intentionally ambiguous.

"We're not trying to say a specific thing," Pugh says. "It's trying to evoke a certain emotion in somebody. People can take from it what they want." The films are not available online yet but will debut around the time of Pugh's Sept. 30 show.

After the film viewing, Pugh hosted a dinner party on the rooftop of Milk Studios. Guests, including M.A.C. cosmetics president John Dempsey, socialite Fabiola Beracasa and fashion designer Esteban Cortazar.