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PARIS, France — Peter Dundas has always worn his rock'n'roll heart on his sleeve, but he's usually been doing so while giving a transfusion to someone else's business. On Sunday night in Paris, it was finally his own name on the invitation and on the label. Everything Dundas ever wanted? "The beginning of everything I ever wanted," he clarified. So we should cut him some slack for a collection whose enthusiastic celebration of his own design DNA (as opposed to that of the houses he's been attached to for the past 20 years) played out as unfocused. It was practically a something-for-everyone proposition — but preferably the kind of leggy, flashy rock goddess who could get away with a sequined t-shirt dress advertising Starship Soul.
Dundas has often expressed his love of unimpeachable female style icons like Talitha Getty and Anita Pallenberg. They've been his pilots through the shallows of Cavalli and Pucci, so it was no surprise that Teddy Quinlivan channeling Talitha in an orange caftan was the star of the show. Simple but deluxe, the look also echoed Pallenberg's epoch-making part as Pherber in "Performance," where she, Mick Jagger and James Fox enacted hypersexual psychodramas in the confines of an extraordinary Notting Hill interior.
The location for Dundas’s show was the Hotel de Gesvres, restored to 17th century splendour by interior architects Joseph Achkar and Michel Charriere. He said he knew he’d be showing there while he was working on the collection, so it was an influence on him. But not enough. If the gilded, fluid extravagance of some of his looks complemented the environment (in the way Pallenberg’s outfits did in "Performance"), others seemed to have come from another creative source entirely, Planet Kardashian perhaps — and I mean you, embroidered denim. Like Dundas cares. “I’m not about half measures in anything I do,” he declared, after a show which played out to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." After all, deep down inside, he's got a rock'n'roll heart.
