Video: Watch Gareth Pugh's catwalk show at the V&A

The designer Gareth Pugh, 25, has caused a stir on the British fashion scene since he made his debut at London Fashion Week in 2005. He is inspired by shape and proportion, and his creations have included a rubber bunny suit, latex gimp masks and monochrome armbands. His clothes also featured in Kylie Minogue’s Showgirls tour. His first selling collection will appear in various stores, including Liberty and Barneys New York, in August.

The models will wear black shiny gimp suits (that cover them from head to toe) at the V&A’s Fashion in Motionthis Friday. The curator asked me to do the fashion show to coincide with the museum’s Surrealism exhibition. They thought that it would tie in quite nicely with the work; they want all the big silly bits included! I made a large poodle outfit and there’s a coat that plugs in and lights up – the one on the HSBC advert.

I love the jacket that illuminates, simply because it was so stressful. The guy who modelled it flew in from Ibiza for the day of my show. When he finally arrived at the venue, the company that made the jacket asked him to sign a contract saying that if he was killed by an electric shock it wouldn’t be their fault – his death would be my responsibility. That was the most stressed I’ve ever been. I was thinking “Oh my God, is he going to short-circuit?” But, ping! It came on and it worked.

When I design I think of a shape and make clothes out of that shape. I don’t want to think about this 50-year-old woman, this lady who lunches. If I thought in that way, I wouldn’t have done all that plastic stuff. But my big plastic coat has been a bestseller with all these rich women in New York. Who would have thought people like them would have bought it? But they did. They were obviously crying out for it – I found my niche market.

Spectacle and wearability don’t necessarily go hand in hand. If you take away the hair and make-up and the stupid tunes, you just have some nice clothes. I did all this stuff with PVC, but someone like Dolce & Gabbana or Cavalli could do something similar – it’s just the way you put it together. Put a girl in a PVC dress and send her down the catwalk to Christina Aguilera with a tan and some sort of updo and it’s going to look really slutty.

It was weird to think that Anna Wintour was sitting on my front row. The music and the lights went down halfway through the show, so it was a bit embarrassing. She did come backstage beforehand but I didn’t really have anything to say to her because I was dealing with the run-through and I was really stressed. She just said “Pleased to meet you, I’m Anna.” She had this huge three-quarter-length chinchilla coat on. She looked amazing.

For my first show I asked some really young girls to model and it didn’t work so well. It’s because 15-year-old girls can’t really walk in a pair of sex shoes. All the proper models were in tears because Eugene did their hair so tight and they had to walk on an inflatable catwalk with massive heels and they couldn’t see.

The models aren’t really that important to me; they just have to be able to walk in heels. I covered up the models’ faces in September. When a model comes out everybody looks at her face, but because I have been working for the past four months on the clothes I want people to look at those, not the faces.

I designed a dress for Kylie’s Showgirls tour. She wore it in the second section when she sings Shocked and Step Back in Time – it’s the Eighties megamix bit. She was wearing a catsuit in black sequins by Body-map, and I made the dress that she wore over that, plus ten backing dancers’ outfits. I made that balloon outfit in black and reflective fabric so that when she was raised out of the stage she was surrounded by these big balloons, then all of a sudden they parted and she was in the middle.

I’d really love to do something for someone like Annie Lennox – or Madonna, though it may be stereotypical to say so. My stuff was sent to her to do the Jump music video in Japan.

But Michael Jackson would be quite good, too. I would dress him in a little taster of what’s coming in my September show. He could pick something, or I’d make what he wanted. I wouldn’t charge him.

I thought Jean Paul Gaultier was the enfant terrible of the fashion world. Am I the slightly more attractive younger brother?

Gareth Pugh is the focus of the V&A’s next Fashion in Motion on Friday. V&A, SW7; www.vam.ac.uk

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