Imagine that William Shakespeare grew weary of writing and gave it all up at the top of his game to curate his garden. Keen not to lose Shakespeare’s audience, his producers drafted in Charles Dickens to write under Shakespeare’s name. This worked for Dickens because a painful contractual wrangle meant that his own name was formally no longer his to write under. Oh, fashion.
Whatever the oddities to the backstory, tonight’s John Galliano show proved (again) that Bill Gaytten is a marquee talent in his own right who is far too good to merely ghostwrite. Not that he isn’t excellent at it. This ’40s-inflected collection contained wry and ravishing allusions to narratives past—most subversively, the cinched waist and emphasized hip of peacoats in black wool, green velvet, and brown astrakhan that whispered of the bar. Topcoats with bold lapels that would have conquered Napoleon came fringed, embroidered, or in shag-accented black astrakhan and emanated house-signature, swashbuckling romance. The real beauties here, though, were dresses and separates, which (whether in lamé, chrysanthemum embroidered silks, button-studded lilac chiffon, or shimmering tonal grids of beading) were rigorously structured to look fluid and catch the eye with apparent oddities of drape and gather. This was a beautifully tailored collection with a handwriting all of its own—with Stephen Jones’s goat-hair flying saucers floating above as the headline.
