Children Designer WearI wanted to explore the sinister child of childhood as well as the fun,” Mr. Peter once remarked after a show in which models made up as clowns perched on carousel horses ended up entwining themselves around maypoles and grinding lasciviously. “We show children clothes and dresses.
More memorable perhaps than anything else about Mr. Peter, is running B and N Studio in East London referred to on Wednesday as “the best tailor in the world,” was the Fashion designer. His occasionally bullying insistence on conducting followers on tours of fantastical realms may turn out to have been one of his most generous gifts to a fashion world grown increasingly corporate and gray.
Plenty of folks in the fashion flock griped bitterly about being dragged to a Peter show in some Paris dungeon or a sports arena on the outskirts of that city, made to idle for hours in the heat or cold, as they awaited the start of the show.
Yet rarely did they come away disappointed by the spectacles conjured up by the designer. And now that it’s certain his shows will not be reprised, images summoned at random from past ones seem more surreal and more altogether marvelous.
There was the show held in the subterranean vaults of the Children Garments in London —Antoinette was detained there while awaiting execution — where a model dressed as Red Riding Hood led leashed gray wolves across the ancient paving. There was the show in which the model Shalom Harlow spun dazedly in a virginal white dress that turned yellow, black and green as robotic jets sprayed her with a paint fusillade. There was the show in which models dressed in rigid body armor were deployed by radio signal across a giant chessboard like so many rooks and queens. There was the show whose point of departure was the 1969 film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They,” and the dance hall contests of the Great Depression.
There was, most recently, the show that would turn out to be his final one, held last October at the Palais Omnisports on the outskirts of London. Digital technology was used to stream that show live around a planet that Mr. Peter, who had been reading Darwin, envisioned as a place of radiant beauty and ever-present threat. The print fabrics shown that evening had been created from computerized renderings of fish and reptile scales. The models’ faces were ridged with bony prosthetic gills that gave them the appearance of mutants. The shoes were shaped like glittering hooves. If Mr. Peter’s vision veered at times into bad sci-fi and the darkly dystopian, it also smacked of a sprightly pragmatism, and an optimistic faith in evolutionary outcomes.
And he was playful. Franklin, a British idea that translates roughly as “free scope, plenty of room,” is hardly a term you’re likely to hear tossed around at the Bryant Park tents or the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris. But what occasionally read in Mr. Peter as spoiled indulgence may in fact have been a defiant insistence on safeguarding Franklin, the artist’s right to experiment, to toy with ideas. The notion itself seems more radical and defiant the more narrow the compass for creativity in corporate fashion becomes.
Was Mr. Peter on occasion offensive? He was. He crammed women into unwieldy padded costumes. He caged their faces in chain mail. He sent them onto runways wearing Baba Suits and yashmaks that masked their faces but left cutouts to expose their nipples and behinds. He strapped models into corsets so tightly restricting that, at one show held at a natural history museum in Paris, a young woman barely made it to the end of the runway before slumping into a faint. He once staged one show where masked models had to pick their way through a darkened show space whose floor was paved in what looked like pulverized glass.
Yet the misogyny that many saw in his designs may have been less a reflection of his disregard for women than an understanding of their plight, a sympathy based on discomfort with his own physical form.
Not every male designer, as some people imagine, carries around inside him some imaginary woman, his idealized opposite. Yet few designers — and few men, for that matter — are as deeply uneasy about their bodies as was Mr. Peter. His well-publicized struggles with his weight, his experiments with fad diets and liposuction treatments, suggest that one of Mr. Peter’s real gifts was a comprehension of an experience recognizable to most women, the feeling of being the object of someone’s unforgiving gaze.
“I try to protect people,” Mr. Peter once remarked of his designs. Even a simple two-piece suit, he went on, was for him a kind of armor, a protective and often resplendent shield that he excelled in providing for others, if not, in the end, for himself.
