One of three collections on show in Paris this week to which John Galliano's name is attached but his hand had no part in drawing (the other two being Galliano's men's and Resort presentations), this Maison Margiela proposal looked house-radical but largely played it pragmatically safe-ish, which was judicious. It's true that as well as the space—an industrially romantic, derelict rail yard in the 18th arrondissement—perhaps a third of the looks paraded within it were paradigm examples of the edgily elusive and sometimes provocatively counterintuitive aura this house fogs itself within. Raw-hemmed, round-neck tank tops in a fabric that could have been treated silk or sliver-thin rubber were worn under an entanglement of outerwear—variously a silver biker, a rust trench, and a black parka. Straight-leg pants, quite normal and expensively constructed, were obscured by strange hanging leg-aprons—floating, front-facing chaps, perhaps. And there was a lot of backward-glance candy, including a sleeveless topcoat whose hem soared to reveal a peek of the metallic-clad bottom of the model inside it. Sometimes Team Margiela affixed a faded fly-poster jumble of papier-mâché to those tank tops.
All of this, though, was basically mood music for a collection whose strength was a suite of tailoring sneakily tweaked to telegraph sinisterly elegant dissent from the norm. Small but do-not-miss details—the rivets that gleamed from one black three-piece, the application of a shawl collar to tails, the extra black satin stripe down the leg of one otherwise unremarkably dégagé black suit, or the use of two jackets in one suit—were all perfectly weighted to appeal to members of the gallerist/frontman/criminal-mastermind demographic in search of a touch of sedition with their sleekness. There were harder-to-wear pieces, too, including a gorgeously specked brown suit with a busily floating collar arrangement and a Lurex-coated two-piece. The boots, which starred those rivets and other punched-on metal extensions, were cool as well. This was a show that tried to satisfy two audiences and pretty much succeeded.
