Fashion is a mad, mad, absolutely mad world—and the real world outside has gone even more incredibly insane. So there was something cathartic about watching as bonkers a show as the one John Galliano put on for Maison Margiela’s Artisanal collection—a place where he can be free to channel nonsensicalness and throw fabric around to his heart’s content. Lamé! Glitter! Brocade! Surreal makeup! After a few minutes, you just surrendered, put the anxious rational mind on hold, and let it sweep you along in a delightful way.
Galliano doesn’t appear at his shows or give interviews before or after these days, so you had to use your own eyes to figure out what he was up to. Since he started out with cream-color safari jackets, skirts, and tops with fragments of more luxe couture fabrics draped across them, the references to toiles and studio works-in-progress were quickly signaled. That was an important move, as it subliminally connected Galliano with Martin Margiela himself, whose label was based on questioning the way fashion is made—and making surreal observations, puns, and jokes about it. Since he joined the house, a certain tension has hovered around the issue of how Galliano would mesh with Margiela’s worldview, but with this show, it lifted. The man in charge now has a different sensibility, but it all begins, spontaneously, by looking at a mannequin in a studio and experimenting with all manner of tryouts.
Rush to the end of the show and you’ll see how that led him to great, bunched-up loops and swathes of couture fabric amalgamated with MA-1 jackets—a funny mating of high concept with street. Further back, though, there were really lovely moments: a soft black lamé jacket with velvet pockets, a glittery sliver streak of a midi dress, a cascade of fan pleating gushing down the front of a belted ivory trenchcoat.
Galliano absolutely knows what he’s doing when it comes to cutting and manipulating fabric—he is an old hand. But part of the reason this show felt so light and uplifting is that it didn’t seem that he was covering his old ground, but stepping lightly and playfully into new territory—with, it must be mentioned, a whole collection of brilliant wedge-cum-high-heeled boots that Maison Margiela ought to make available right away.
