Fundamentally, the job of a new creative director at a heritage brand is to figure out what makes the brand tick—the stuff that people know it for—and then decide how to contemporize those codes, make them freshly relevant.Fundamentally, the job of a new creative director at a heritage brand is to figure out what makes the brand tick—the stuff that people know it for—and then decide how to contemporize those codes, make them freshly relevant. A truly genius creative director uses his or her fluency in the brand vocabulary to write an entirely new chapter for the house. Fran Stringer, not quite a year into her tenure at Pringle of Scotland, has definitely got the first part down: As her latest Pringle collection demonstrated, she’s done her time in the archives, has keyed into the Pringle identity, and is coming up with ways to refresh it. That was notably apparent in this outing’s range of technical knits, including the bell-shaped dresses and separates in double-faced merino, which riffed on Pringle’s long-standing expertise in knitwear, and found a new outlet for it in modern, sculptural silhouettes. There were other nods to the archive here—vintage floral prints, undyed looks that hearkened back to Pringle’s history as a maker of nightdresses and long johns, merino sweats, and seamless nylon macs with a sporty mien. The primary colors, too, paid respect to the Pringle legacy: At an appointment today, Stringer called out a few images on this season’s moodboard, shots from 1960s-era Pringle ad campaigns, featuring cheerful models in brightly colored sweaters. Seeing those shots made you realize the degree to which Stringer is reworking the house’s default mood—clean-scrubbed and preppy dispensed with in favor of a Zen-like tone. It’s in that change of attitude that you can detect the beginning of a new chapter for Pringle. Whether Stringer—a designer with a sure hand, and an appealing sensibility—has the genius to make that chapter feel truly distinctive remains to be seen.
POST: 2024-04-18