The Designer Prabal Gurung and His Feathered Headdress Prabal Gurung with the Moulin Rouge headdress he found 11 years ago. EVERY new Fashion Week is like every new day. Both suggest a clean slate but, before long, both require a fresh round of bargaining with the past, haggling over how the future will play out. "Who you are today is a ghost of your past," said the fast-rising New York designer Prabal Gurung. The observation sounds a bit dark and moody for the amiable young talent, who introduced his line three years ago, full of bright colors and sexy, feminine silhouettes that instantly endeared him to, among many others, the first lady. Lately, though, Mr. Gurung has shown that there's bite behind the smile. True, on the rack, his violet-tinged spring collection looks floralicious enough for socialites and actresses who need a camera-ready frock to face the photographers. But then, two months ago, there was the actress Rooney Mara's buzzed-about appearance at the New York premiere of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," wearing a jagged, revealing number by the designer that sliced the little black dress wide open. Mr. Gurung said that his sensibility is about exploring the tension between those two poles. "A lot of people underestimate conflict and tension and look at it as a negative thing," he said. I feel exactly the opposite. That comfort is so overestimated. It's the death of creativity or new ideas. For the designer himself, though, the tension is less between the pink and the punk than between the past and the present, a conflict that manages to be intriguingly encapsulated in, of all things, a feathered headdress from the glory days of the Moulin Rouge, the decadent fin de siècle nightclub in Paris. Mr. Gurung came across the piece, a fountain of peacock feathers, sequins and gold bullion, at a vintage fashion fair in Manhattan 11 years ago, just after he had graduated from Parsons the New School for Design and had his first real job. He was immediately hooked by its romance of long-faded glamour. The movie "Moulin Rouge" came out the same month, stoking the fantasy even further. "That was my favorite film at that time - it's so much like Bollywood," said Mr. Gurung, who grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and spent his teenage years in Delhi, India. I love the story of this courtesan looking for love and wanting so much to find it. Love and its various stages - finding it, losing it - have always intrigued me. As sad as it can be, it's really beautiful, too. But the headdress reminded him of more than fin de siècle Montmartre. It also reminded him of the ornate religious imagery of Hindu gods that surrounded him growing up. "It seemed so scarily familiar and reminded me a bit of home, even though it couldn't be farther away," he said. It was not the most comfortable recollection. In the traditional atmosphere, he said, his creative bent seemed more of a curse than a blessing, and as a child, he longed for nothing more than escape. "I'm not big on nostalgia, because that at-times-painful history is haunting," he said. I learned to live in the present, because you can't live in the past. I'm not really attached to material stuff, but I've held on to this for such a long time. For 10 years, it's hung in my bathroom, which is my sanctuary, so when I look in the mirror, it's there. It's an interesting kind of reconciliatory act, to look up and see both a token of fantasy, poetry and what might be, and a souvenir of a reality that was and that helped make you who and what you are. It sounds rather difficult - like a happy dream, wrapped in a wet blanket. But since you can't deny either its due, some sort of peace treaty, even one fraught with tension and sequins, sounds pretty reasonable. If only all of us could see so much when we looked in the mirror.