John Galliano is back in the spotlight
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The show that closed the Parisian couture week was called Maison Margiela Artisanal Collection – the Maison Margiela house does not and has never had couture. But this is a small thing compared to the fact that there was nothing specifically Marzhelian in the collection at all; four white stitches on the back or tabi boots on the models’ feet were pure convention. The collection turned out to be a complete and total return of Galliano to Dior’s times with his aestheticism, historicism, poetics of the miserables – and emotionality. It seems that the latter was the main reason for the dizzying success.
This year marks 10 years since John Galliano became artistic director of Maison Margiela. Three years earlier, in 2011, Galliano, once an absolute star and the darling of the fashion world, was fired from Dior after a scandal over his anti-Semitic remarks, in one of the first cases of canceling in popular culture. By this time, Gallian’s collections at Dior had not been relevant for some time to anything that was happening in life or fashion – neither the new wave of feminism, which was then just rising, nor the new wave of minimalism, which, in turn, covered fashion – and this was obvious to both professionals and the public.
After the scandal, the designer practically disappeared – with a short break for the news of his appointment to Maison Margiela – from the fashion spotlight. The Maison Margiela studio successfully produces clothes based on a moderate adaptation of Margiela’s archives; Galliano’s presence does not affect these clothes in any way – and meanwhile, in fashion, more than one generation of heroes has changed, associated precisely with the legacy of Martin Margiela, but not John Galliano. And only at regularly held exhibitions of the house of Dior, outfits from its legendary collections of the golden first years still pile up, shine and sparkle, creating the necessary extravaganza. All this remains in the past, in the archives, in the history of fashion. And then suddenly: social networks explode with delight, and fashion critics call Galliano a “game changer.”
Meanwhile, no fundamental changes occurred in Galyanov’s couture game – the same cocottes in stockings and boys in corsets, the same porcelain doll faces, the same fin de siècle and decadence, the same historicism and decorativeness. And the same easily readable references – Kees van Dongen, Boldini, Toulouse-Lautrec; the press release lists more photographs of Brassaï from the 1920s and 1930s. Galliano’s legendary collection for Dior Haute Couture SS 2000 immediately appears before your eyes, dedicated in the first part to Parisian clochards and in the second to Parisian encroyables (for some reason, critics do not remember them, and this is Galliano’s most important motif since his graduation collection Les Incroyables) . We can mention the even less famous couture collection of autumn-winter 1997 Bagatelle, where the models had red nest hairstyles on their heads, as in the drawings of Paul Elle, and there was a dress – the prototype of the current dresses with imitation pubic hair, which shocked/delighted everyone so much.
Of course, there are changes. All these shepherdesses from the final part of the collection, led by the monumental Gwendoline Christie, in latex dresses, with pads on the chest and on the back of the head, as if connected by stitches with living flesh, gloomy half-naked young men in high latex gloves of a pathologist, and even a one-armed singer who opened the show , – all of them are not so much clochard style as Frankenstein style, characters from silent films about a mad doctor who created a monster doll. Gone was the decorative pomp and glamor – and for all the exaggerated sophistication of the craft techniques that Galliano is said to be very passionate about, there was a greater concentration on characters and on the creation of various stage effects – fake shadows and spots on the surface of dresses and coats (Galliano began as a theater designer ). In addition, before Galliano could not sexualize his characters so much, there were no young men tightening each other’s corsets and other queer references. But all this is not enough to cause such a single outburst of delight, in which both criticism and the public merged.
Fashion is not only a laboratory of ideas (and yes, there were no new ideas in this collection), but also a laboratory of emotions. And Galliano managed to get into very important emotions with his collection. First of all, this is a joyful surprise: now we expect from couture either roses and lace, or life-size 3D lion faces, both of which have become familiar and boring – but here we were shown something from the golden age of fashion, which everyone remembers nostalgically. But much more important is another, almost fundamental emotion, which is most accurately conveyed by the epithet transportive – ecstatically captivating and involving. It was she who pulled in and pulled in everyone – both those present at the show under the Alexander III Bridge and those watching on the screen – she brought conviction in the possibility of transformation for those who are wearing these clothes and those who see them.
The most relevant emotions that fashion (all fashion, not just couture) have recently offered us are Lynchian anxious anticipation or outright post-apocalyptic despair. Both are quite in tune with the moment of unpredictability in which we find ourselves, but at the same time they are too painful and devoid of any transformative power. We don’t know whether Galliano’s show will change fashion, but now we know for sure how tired everyone is of the apocalypse and how eager they are for carnival.
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