The multiplicity of angles from which John Galliano’s Maison Margiela Artisanal collection can be perceived are dizzying and not a little surreal. There is the fact that a young French soldier in full combat gear, carrying a giant automatic weapon, was standing guard as the audience filed into Les Invalides and across the beautiful 18th-century quadrangle that houses the museum of military costume, a statue of Napoleon looking down on them from a great height. Galliano’s collection mixed up fragments of technical urban streetwear with references to French revolutionary times, including a swaggering military greatcoat and a tricorne hat, worn at a jaunty angle, which might almost have been purloined from Napoleon’s own wardrobe. The parallels and clashes between French history and the gritty street reality of today’s Paris—was that the conscious import of Galliano’s collection? Could it be that his opening look, an orange mackintosh, belted and worn upside down, was comment on the crazy topsy-turvy state of the time we’re living in?
Anyone with an eye to what Galliano does would have to say both yes and no. Scholars of his early work know that the designer has had a career-long romance with French revolutionary times, which began with Les Incroyables, his graduation collection from Central Saint Martins, shown in 1984. Reference spotters leapt on the fact that he reprised an idea for a dress—dampened muslin, embroidered with red lace—from a collection he once did about the post-revolutionary Merveilleuses, a group of girls who went about Paris draped in transparent Grecian dresses. Galliano’s love of the empire line in general was evident here, too, in a lovely white Greek-style gown, though this time with a pair of red and white chopped-off leather sleeves from a motocross jacket knotted around the upper arms.
It has long been a Galliano-ism to put clothes on upside down and back to front, too, part of his experimental mission to question tradition and find new forms in clothing—a process that he’s extending into wrapping, draping, and twisting swags of fabric to create new volumes. But there was a crucial difference between this collection and a purely self-referential Galliano retrospective: the way generic outerwear came into the story. With the tricorne and greatcoat were a tartan shirtdress, a Barbour-like padded liner, and Wellington boot waders. Further along, a gutsy yellow sailing coat and a silver wind-cheater technical hoodie got involved. That in itself was a nod to the methodology of Martin Margiela, who founded his Artisanal collection on the practice of skewing, upcycling, and repurposing existing garments in surreally witty ways. Yet it’s also an on-point participation in the energy of what’s happening in the real world of young fashion. There’s a renewed sense of outward-looking engagement in Galliano’s work now.
