Unhinged Galliano. Maison Margiela SS24 Couture

January 27, 2024 | Design & Culture by Ed

The moment the Maison Margiela haute couture show started, it was clear that no other collection we’ve seen this week really matters anymore. John Galliano did the most noble thing a contemporary designer can do: make people believe in fashion again. And confirm that couture is still really, really needed, because it can be the most beautiful, visually striking, inspiring and astonishing form of escapism.

In the last couple of seasons at Margiela, it was clear that Galliano is returning back to himself as a designer. But this spring-summer 2024 couture collection feels like a total release, total encapsulation of the unhinged Galliano – even not from the Dior days, but rather the early 90s shows in Paris under his own name, that stunned with theatricality, pure romanticism and casts of model so authentic you believed you’ve been transported to a different epoque. The scene: under the Pont d’Alexandre III after dark, down rain-soaked steps, with the Seine roiling alongside, a rancid Parisian nighttime joint with bare floorboards, cafe tables, dim mirrors, and a bar overflowing with spent drinks. The runway mise-en-scène suddenly turned into a living Brassai’s 1920s and ’30s portraits of the night-time underbelly of Paris’s clubs and streets. Galliano’s transferences into cutting, ultra-extreme corsetry, padded hips, erotically sheer lace dresses, and wildly imaginative hair, chiffon-masked makeup, and eerie doll-like body-modifications took a year. A year to work on a production that seamlessly mixed film – which played in the mirrors – into the scenario, showing lovers, dancers, and gangsters prowling the banks of the Seine. To make it seem that these strutting denizens, fugitives from fights, or half-dressed from sexual encounters, clutching their moon-bleached coats or scrappy cardigans around them were actually congregating from the riverside and into the club before our eyes. Through some of Galliano’s beautifully delicate hourglass dresses there was pubic hair to be seen through tulle and lace (they were merkins on underwear, but still bound to stir up a storm). Some of his indescribable techniques looked almost like walking paintings, greenish-pink watercolor nudes with blurry dabs for eyes. All the images and impressions from this show will be burned on the mind’s eye for many reasons and many years.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Madame X. Maison Margiela SS24

October 5, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

It was a great joy to see John Galliano thrive with his return to Paris Fashion Week schedule. This Maison Margiela collection felt like just the right balance of Galliano’s romanticism, and the brand’s knack for garment deconstruction. Imagining how a young, present-day descendant might customise an inherited wardrobe, the designer proposed a series of “exfoliage” dresses where the top layer of the bust had been ripped off and pulled down over the skirt to reveal its lining. He’d then boldly run that silhouette over with a laminate roller and covered the fabric in high-shine varnish, creating a relief effect where it was layered. He evolved that technique in “pressage” dresses and shirts, which you have to imagine came out of a suitcase completely flattened after which they were laminated, their creases and drapes pressed down for eternity. In the “misfit” evening dresses the closed the show, Galliano evoked the gestures of DIY party girls, shortening hems with tape, twisting necklines into straps, and styling pieces back-to-front. Galliano scored the show with the powerful song “Masculinity” by Lucky Love. Its lyrics – “Do I walk like a boy, do I speak like a boy, do I stand like a boy” – served as a reminder of the genderless attitude with which he approaches fashion. With that in mind, the Katharine Hepburn-esque tailoring fused with gestures from the mid-century lady’s wardrobe in a string of coats and suits that nailed our burgeoning appetite for elegant ease and simplified sophistication. Later, Galliano continued his tailoring story in jackets cut in the image of mid-century mauvais garçons – street urchins – and the gestures that shaped their clothes. Galliano cast those movements with Oscar-worthy gusto.

This wonderful Maison Margiela moment was creativity-driven and life affirming: a designer having a ton of fun with fashion, but executing his ideas with the most inventive, cutting-edge expertise. Often its most immediate effect lies simply in the gesture of a mid-century hat made from wire and bin liners, or a polka dot you suddenly realise looks like a cartoon character, or the sassy walk of a model who finally gets to have a good time on a runway. All this, of course, is a product of the authentic and truly passionate love of fashion that compels this designer to imagine stories, dress up its characters in his mind, and execute those fantasies in real life.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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What’s Hot (12.8.23)

August 12, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

An Ode To Punk. Maison Margiela AW23

January 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The world became a sadder place without the Dame and the Queen of punk, Vivienne Westwood, who passed away just a couple of days before the New Year. Who else could create a more authentic and vivid tribute to Westwood’s work – and the entire subculture she helped create and kept leading – than John Galliano? His co-ed autumn-winter 2023 collection for Maison Margiela, one of the best ready-to-wear collections he’s done for the brand in a while, makes you believe punk isn’t dead. Galliano brought up the term ‘Rorschach test’ for the subjective seeing of different things when we look at fashion. Through these eyes, it looked very like a fierce, urgent reveling in the subcultural spirit of the 1970s and early ’80s in London – Galliano’s youth, but brought forward, mashed up for today. “You might see some familiar figures in it,” he suggested. “Jordan on the King’s Road; the fishnets; Johnny Rotten, maybe.” He’d sent out crude collaged photocopied flyers with his invitations – like fanzines and invites to underground gigs, the way kids navigated nightlife long before mobile phones. A couple of models were clutching them with their handbags as they lurched down the runway, as if in a hurry to get somewhere. In some of their hats, fancifully collaged from trash bags and scraps of tulle, were cockades made from chopped-up flyers. The plaids didn’t look like punk tartan – Westwood’s eternally favorite fabric—but then again, it almost did. And, to these eyes at least, there she was, almost personified in the girls who were dashing along in Galliano’s ingeniously wrapped pencil skirts – the sexy ’50s rocker style that Vivienne always spoke about as the first clothes she loved making for herself as a teenager. If that really was a salute to the late designer, it was also mixed up in the layers and layers of Galliano’s spins on 1950s tulle ballgowns, his huge, swinging opera coats, and chopped-up Americana. There were also Western-type jackets with Mickey Mouse plackets, Hawaiian prints, all seen through a punk, D-I-Y filter. Beautiful and emotionally moving.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Undying Love. John Galliano AW95

December 27, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

The festive time lets you look back at some fashion history in a relaxed, pleasurable way. After all the food, gift unwrapping, Christmas table talks and re-watches of both “Home Alone” films, I indulged myself in the beauty of John Galliano archives. And one of his pre-establishment collections just felt so right in this moment. Galliano’s autumn-winter 1995 “Dolores” collection marks a pivotal moment. It was essentially his last as an indie designer. About four months after this presentation, Galliano was named the creative director of Givenchy; a year later he transferred to Christian Dior and his namesake brand was acquired by LVMH. The Dolores of the show title was the actor Dolores del Rio. The invitation to the presentation consisted of pages from the heroine’s “tortured correspondence from the Rose of Alhambra hotel to her lover, Jaime, aboard the ocean liner Berengaria, along with a lock of hair and a broken locket,” reported The New York Times. Arriving at the venue, guests were ushered onto a snow-covered rooftop set littered with scows and populated by burly sailors. One of them, the report continued, “with bare feet and red manicured toes leaned against a chimney reading a book called Killer in Drag.” Perhaps most exuberant were the flamenco dresses, which allowed Galliano, who was born in Gibraltar, to iterate on his own heritage. There were ruffled numbers cut on the bias in shades of lavender and fuchsia, and peinetas (hair combs) took the place of tiaras. The Catholic imagination was also at work. A model in a whisper-light dress of virginal white carried a rosary and was followed by a shipmate wearing an ersatz crown made of prayer cards. Wearing a silk fuchsia number with a tulle bolero, Kate Moss kissed Johnny Depp seating in the front row. Another real love story of this collection was that between a man and his scissors. Galliano romanced the cloth with a technical savoir faire that was awe-inspiring. The carnation dress worn by Carla Bruni was not only cut on the bias but seamless, thanks to the floral inserts. One of these dresses is in the collection of The Met’s Costume Institute, and the catalog description notes that Galliano used the carnation “as a symbol of undying love.” What more is there to say?