Peter Dundas is shockingly good-looking. Golden and athletic with blond curls , for goodness sake, the 44-year-old creative director of Emilio Pucci has a beachy glamour that is miles away from the icy, detached aesthetic many fashion designers seem to cultivate. In photographs - gold-rimmed sunglasses flashing, shirt unbuttoned too far - he gleams like a 1970s film star. In interviews he talks devilishly of sketching in bed.
Such attractiveness might intimidate a girl and it is with some trepidation that I wait for this Norwegian playboy in the feng shui-ed offices of his London PR team. He has been doing a dress fitting with a member of the Royal family. (No one will tell me which one so I decide it's the Duchess of Cambridge and feel gratified when she then appears in public in an Emilio Pucci navy suit.)
He lumbers in, very tall in linen, smiling, polite, a little self-conscious, and confessing that he was late for his anonymous Royal. 'You're not supposed to be late,' he says with the sheepish look of someone who most certainly got away with it.
He has a pleasantly gloopy Norwegian-turned-North American accent and a Scandinavian earthiness and sense of humour that might seem at odds with his appearance and his career in high-octane glamour. (Prior to Pucci he designed for Roberto Cavalli, Emanuel Ungaro and the furrier Revillon, and was a consultant for Dolce & Gabbana - none of them labels for the minimalist or faint-hearted.) 'People have stopped saying, "But you're Norwegian - it doesn't make sense!"' he says with a grin. 'Someone I work with says I was a showgirl in Las Vegas in my past life.'
From the Emilio Pucci spring/summer 2013 collection
More laughter. 'I guess I just like things that feel a little more special. I have a way of reacting t o colours or embroideries or the body the same way that [one] does to food. Eat something, mmm… It's the same way with a really well cut dress. I guess I'm attracted to houses that let me feel like that.'
He joined the house of Pucci in 2009 and has given it a good stir. Emilio Pucci was an Italian nobleman, sportsman, military man and politician who in the late 1940s started designing skiwear.
From the Emilio Pucci spring/summer 2013 collection
His house was famous in the 1960s and 1970s both for its glorious, instantly recognisable kaleidoscopic prints and the jet-set lifestyle of its designer and clientele, which included Jacqueline Onassis and Alana Stewart. After Emilio retired in 1990 other designers, including Christian Lacroix and Matthew Williamson, took the helm. While Pucci never went away it is Dundas who has been most successful in updating the brand for a new generation of young socialites and the stars of entertainment.
Gwyneth Paltrow, Carine Roitfeld and Anna Dello Russo are all regularly seen wearing his sexy red-carpet outfits, which play to the strengths of a glossy, well-trained physique. His clothes rejoice in a toned thigh, a firm stomach, a bare glossy back. Even the more covered-up styles of the current winter collection involve tantalising glimpses of skin. 'I like the body,' says Dundas. 'If there's no body there it becomes boring to me. There are lots of designers who approach from a more intellectual point of view but I don't, so I hope that what I bring to women is that they feel special, a little more beautiful or a bit more desirable in their clothes.'
Gwyneth Paltrow in Emilio Pucci at the Emmy Awards in 2011 (GETTY)
Some of the success is perhaps down to his confidence in moving away from the revered Pucci archive ('moving out of the library', as he puts it). His collections are often very light on prints. 'In the past there was a lot of respect,' he says of previous designers. 'I think I've brought disrespect. Respectful disrespect. I could have gotten more heat for that but I'm very grateful that I didn't.'
Emilio's daughter Laudomia Pucci, very much at the core of the business as its image director, certainly doesn't want to give him any 'heat' when I speak to her on the phone. Business is booming, after all. Last month a store opened in New York and 20 more openings are planned across the world over the next 18 months. 'There are very few houses that are second-generation family in Italy,' she says. 'Peter has given us a fresh spin. He allows us to be old but yet one of the hot houses. He's brought in a lot of energy. Also, he knows where luxury belongs. There's a big [economic] crisis out there. If people are going to spend money they want something special. Peter understands the energy, dynamism of the Italian woman but the quality of detail is so rich. His approach is couture.'
Dundas spends a lot of time doing fittings with clients. Along with sketching (which for the record he says he does 'at a table as well as in bed') it's the thing he enjoys most. 'When you see someone in person, you see what's great about them. You see, "Oh my gosh, that's a fantastic waist," so you can adjust [to enhance that]. Or, "That dress looks heavy on her; let's lose the sleeves."
'Fit is super, super important,' he continues. 'The girls that I know that really dress well, like Carine Roitfeld, they always have at least a couple of fittings. It's about what's right for you.' If only every woman had a designer to fit her for every occasion, I say enviously. He laughs. 'Well, you know a good seamstress is worth her weight in gold as well.'
Peter Dundas with Carine Roitfeld (left) and Anna Dello Russo at Milan Fashion Week 2010 (GETTY)
Peter Dundas made his first clothes aged six. It's not quite as cutesy as it sounds. Born in Oslo, he was just four when his American mother, a violinist, died of flu, leaving her husband, a doctor, to bring up Peter and his sister. 'My father was 50 when I wa s born and he was stuck in a hospital so he had no idea how to dress kids, you know? Also what he thought was nice and reasonable pricewise was not… I remember him talking later on about how surprisingly inexpensive it was to raise children. I was like, "Yeah, right…"' He is smiling.
'Working within the limitations', as he calls it, he started going through his father's trunks of old clothes and customising garments that belonged to his grandparents. 'And then my father, being frugal, saw me and thought, "Oh well, he can make his own clothes." So I got a sewing-machine probably because he thought that was a way of saving money rather than [being about] stimulating his son's creativity.'
His elderly aunts, who looked after the children while their father was working, helped him with sewing and also taught him how to bake. 'A woman who is 70 years old, she doesn't play ball with you, she teaches you what she knows. So, yes, I can bake as well. I make a mean bread. But it was all right. It makes you a little bit different.'
The young baking, sewing Peter Dundas turning up at school in his father's surgical gowns and fleamarket finds must have been a sight to behold. 'There were no rules at home for what to wear. My father was just happy with a tear in his eye that I had found something for nothing.' He guffaws. Apparently he was 'the class clown' and for three years from the age of nine channelled his extrovert tendencies in regional theatre, but it was pretty much a given that his future lay in medicine.
This was fine until he attended high school in America, after going to live with his uncle in Indiana at the age of 14, and encountered physics. 'I hated it and thought, "If this is just the beginning…" So then it was, "OK, what do I really love? I love fashion but fashion isn't serving any purpose. But if I'm going to be unhappy serving a purpose, that's worse because I won't be a good addition on this planet."'
Sounds like a pretty tortured decision for a 16-year-old. 'Well, it's a big deal when your family are doctors because you feel like you're supposed to fix people and help them and all,' he says. 'What's fashion going to be like? Sitting around and thinking about people in dresses. That's not saving lives, is it? So I kind of entered into it that way, not entirely happily. But now I realise that fashion makes you feel good and there's a lot to be said for that.'
He went to Parsons design school in New York and then to Paris, barely speaking French. He worked as a costume designer for the Comédie Française and then bluffed his way into a job at Jean Paul Gaultier. 'I went in on the Friday,' he says. 'Jean Paul, he talks a lot, and very fast and I didn't know much French. He kept asking me if I knew how to do all these things so I thought I'd better say yes. So I just said yes to everything with as much conviction as possible and by Monday I was working as his first assistant.' He had to learn a lot on the job. 'I didn't know how to do the simplest things. I think I drove him crazy but he was a great teacher. It was a good gig.'
He stayed with Gaultier for eight years and, though he wanted to become a creative director in his own right, he didn't want to start his own label. 'I liked the arrangement of an established house,' he says. 'I always liked the ateliers and the good pattern-makers and even the management. I liked the press person - the mean Frenchwoman with the high heels and Ray-Bans and the " non, ce n'est pas possible ". I liked the head of the atelier having a nervous breakdown. It was part of the fashion dream for me. Having a new energy mixed with the allure and solidity of an established house - that made something more strong happen.'
From the Emilio Pucci spring/summer 2013 collection
It certainly seems to have been the case at Emilio Pucci, which is based in Florence, and where Laudomia Pucci says that Dundas is 'comfortable and happy, and that matters. You know, I heard him the other day speaking to someone and he said, "In Florence everything is over 500 years old and anything younger is no good." And I thought, "Hey, he's really speaking Florentine now."'
Dundas claims that he's 'the laziest person on the planet… I can't imagine having a job. What I do is like a passion or hobby or sometimes a game. When I sketch that doesn't feel like work and when I'm fitting it doesn't at all. One of my friends has an accounting company and, yes, of course he's interested in it but he works so that at 5pm he can then enjoy himself. For me to give up the whole day to do that… No way. So that's what I mean by being lazy. I just want to have fun.'
Anyway, he says, he might retire early. I laugh but he's serious. 'Sometimes you meet designers who have been doing this their whole life and you think how exhausting that must be. I know how it is for me - you give it your all every time. I think for everybody creative there's a shelf-life.'
In a parallel world Dundas has a bar on a beach somewhere. 'Just hanging out all day - I would love that.' But is he as good at cocktails as he is at dresses? He shrugs. 'Yeah, I've got a couple up my sleeve.'
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