Arguably, the purpose of a fashion show — or just about anything else today — is to go viral. In the sea of information our exhausted brains drown in, standing out is thought to be the key to success. In the past years fashion has retooled itself to provide viral moments onstage – stunning, in the case of UNDERCOVER’s Spring/Summer 2024 dresses whose skirts were lighted terrariums with live butterflies, or gimmicky, like Coperni’s Bella Hadid spray-on dress. Those who cannot afford lavish sets resort to stunts, like Heliot Emil setting one of its models on fire.
The handful of large brands with mind-bending show budgets use the sets to hide the mediocrity of the clothes rather than complement their greatness, as it was done by designers like Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and John Galliano.
The realm of haute couture, so rarified that it often seems to be out of touch with the real world, is no stranger to viral moments, like Schiappareli’s fake lion heads that put the Instaverse on edge, proving once again the PR dictum that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Maison Margiela’s 2024 Artisanal collection, designed by Galliano, also went viral. But unlike many other shows its virality was due not to some Insta-ready stunt, but to Galliano’s formidable design talent.
To be sure, there were widely shared and wildly discussed "porcelain doll" makeup and hairy panties. (The artisan who made the latter and posted on their Instagram about it, has since taken down her pictures. Maison Margiela’s PR did not return a request for comment.) But what really made the fashion public swoon was the utter mastery of the show. For once, it was all about the clothes.
That Galliano is one of the most brilliant designers in the history of fashion can hardly be disputed. In March of 1994 when his fledgling brand was in trouble, Galliano staged a Hail Mary show in Paris. He had no money, so most of the nineteen looks were made from the same black fabric, the only thing Galliano could afford.
The venue was a house lent to him by Sao Schlumberger, a Parisian socialite; all the models, including heavy hitters like Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell, worked for free; Vogue’s André Leon Tally and Anna Wintour made sure it was publicized — such was the love that young Galliano elicited from the fashion in-crowd.
That show was a triumph of sheer design talent. A year later Galliano was designing for Givenchy, and a year after that, Dior.
After his 2011 anti-Semitic tirades Galliano was ousted from Dior and eventually found a home at Maison Margiela, again with Wintour’s help.
This seemed like a mismatch – Margiela was the coldly cerebral Beligan, Galliano was all about Mediterranean sweeping romance – and on many levels it was. Galliano had to tone down the astounding theatrics he was used to at Dior (those shows were viral before the word viral was invented). But theater and historicity – many of Galliano's collections owe a debt to his obsession with 18th and 19th-century European dress – is in Galliano’s blood, and with this Artisanal show he finally let it loose.
Let’s get the hairy panties out of the way, which will require getting past the knee-jerk reaction of looking at a thinly veiled female bush, faux or otherwise. Galliano’s work often requires unpacking the art history references, and the underwear, painstakingly hand-made – it is couture, after all – using human hair, were a throwback to Belle Époque French female nude photo postcards. And though, understandably, they caused much conversation, what made Galliano’s show so well-received by the fashion crowd was his mastery of design and storytelling that stood head and shoulders above all other couture shows of recent history.
Everything that Galliano is tremendous at was there – twisted tailoring, masterful deconstruction, a play on proportions, all done in the service of fusing the romantic with the macabre. And his fascination with historical dress and decay was on full display with corsetry and the layering of carefully distressed fabrics.
Again, art history lessons were bountiful. The opening corset look – which came with its own story shot on video – was likely inspired by the famous Horst P. Horst photograph. There were also echoes of the Fauvist painter Kees Van Dongen in the heavily painted veils. The sinister smoke-under-the-bridge mis-an-scéne was inspired by Brassai’s iconic photos of nocturnal Paris.
It is this richness of references, rendered in the setting, in the way the models moved, but most importantly in the garments themselves, that amounted to fantastical (and fantastic) story-telling.
The clothes-making techniques made one thing resemble another, one of several nods to Martin Margiela, the house’s founder.
Layers of organza were smashed together and painted to look like wool. In another feat of trompe-l’oeil, the leather neck-pieces by the artisan Robert Mercier, who also made Beyoncé’s Mugler queen bee suit and Zendaya’s Balmain wet-look leather dress, were painted to resemble porcelain.
Temporary adjustments – of putting up a collar or hiking up a trouser – were permanently cut into the garments to reshape silhouettes, a technique Galliano called “emotional cutting.” Wool coats and jackets were shrunk by boiling. Some garments took nine months to make.
The fashion media, so starved of talent and forced to contort itself into excreting complimentary reviews of so many mediocre shows, went into frenzied headline one-upmanship. “The John Galliano Show My Generation Has Been Waiting For,” declared a Vogue headline. “Maison Margiela’s Couture Collection Will Go Down in History,” predicted The Cut. Not to be outdone, Another Magazine proclaimed, “Why John Galliano’s Astonishing Margiela Show Will Change Fashion Forever.”
Whether it will change fashion forever or not, the breathless praise that the fashion media often dishes out all too readily, was, for once, deserved. But underpinning all of the praise is this undeniable fact: Galliano’s triumph was achieved with fabric and scissors, not with Insta-gready gimmicks that more often than not are created to distract our attention from bland clothes.
With this show and in one fell swoop, Galliano restored, at least temporarily, the primacy of design to fashion. One could hardly ask for more.
