Fashion seems to enter a new era. As good fashion is supposed to do – bring change. Quiet luxury is becoming quite over. We live in crazy times and a more urgent expression is needed. And it was John Galliano who rang in the new times with his Maison Margiela Haute Couture show at the beginning of the year with its extreme display of fashion emotions. One can nearly speak about before and after that show which was 18 months in the making. An unexpected fashion bomb dropped on Paris in an iconic location underneath the historic Pont Alexandre III.

One could guess that the number of real Haute Couture clients at Margiela is modest, but it still did not hold the designer and his financier Renzo Rosso back to flex their muscles by bringing Kim Kardashian along for the ride in an exclusively designed cut out dress while “five minutes” before she was announced as worldwide ambassador for Balenciaga. Only in fashion. Nearly an hour late, the show brought back the best Galliano plying his trade memories. A tour de force of couture shapes via body padding for women and newspaper boy silhouettes for men, it had all the drama in the staging merging video, venue and show to a fantasy concoction worthy of the highest form of theater performance – one of Galliano’s hallmarks. Let’s call it body-modifying couture. It’s clear that he has given a whole set of new codes to Margiela with his outrageous silhouettes, inventive cutting and crazy treatment of the finest of fabrics to conjure up a world of decadence where the clothes are the catalyst to ignite deeply personal visions of a seasoned couturier. The press release listed more than ten new techniques he employed to make this show including Seamlace where garments are constructed entirely from encrusted fragments of lace or Milletrage, a new technique in which featherlight layers pose as heavy-duty coats by trompe-l’oeil printing. How long did it take to teach the models how to put on the perfect walk, how long did it take to put on the make-up which looked like spray painted on the models’ faces like shiny surfaces or a bird’s nest hair? From what we hear he worked on this for 18 months, found the location while jogging along the Seine. Paris as it was captured by Brassaï is one of Galliano’s leitmotifs.

The house held re-see’s of the Haute Couture collection during the last Ready-to-wear season and it was incredible to see how deeply this collection was researched with an entire library of photo books for each look compiled by his team and others on matters such as street photography in the 1920s. With this show, he could regain access to the sacred halls of Paris couture and the wider industry as the sheer force of his talent shines so brightly and begs the question why he is not back at one of the major Parisian houses? A two-hour documentary by Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of One Day in September and The Last King of Scotland, argues that it is about time to forgive him for his suite of anti- Semitic outbursts at a Paris café in 2010 and 2011. The documentary is about Galliano’s rise, fall, and attempted redemption which opened in U.S. cinemas and will eventually be streamed on Mubi. Even LVMH seems to want to rehabilitate him. Former Dior CEO Sidney Toledano says in the movie he has forgiven Galliano, and, in 2022, he and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault posed with Galliano for photographers at the opening of the exhibition Monet-Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. In the picture as well? Anna Wintour who is the subject of another Stoff in this issue and seems to be orchestrating this redemption from behind the scenes as Condé Nast Entertainment partnered with Macdonald. Let’s see where this goes.

This article first appeared in Achtung Mode Nr. 47