Fake news isn’t always bad. Tonight, Bill Gaytten rolled the presses on the reborn Galliano Gazette, once a seasonal staple print whose circulation fell to zero (kidswear apart) following the designer’s installation as creative director in 2011. Its return on a pleated skirt, underwear, a hatbox, a PVC mac, plus other bits and bobs reflected the brand’s fans’ enduring appetite for editorial directness.
Were he not such an outrageously gifted dressmaker, Gaytten could have had quite a career as a tabloid newsman. Check his fake news on tonight: “The collection is presented as the aftermath of a very hot, passionate one-night stand between a young farmworker in the Midwest and a burlesque dancer from a traveling circus. He wakes up the next morning and, not only has she had him, but the circus has left town and she’s stolen all his clothes as well.”
Scandal! But where did this felonious clinch occur? “Right by the lion cage—with lions roaring into the night!” Okay, Bill—I’d been looking for geography, not atmospheric embellishment—but that works, too.
Gaytten’s embroidery matched that embellishment in his “diamond bracelet” inserts on tulle dresses. He mixed menswear-inspired pieces (knit underwear, lovely dropped-skirt pleat dresses and skirts in check, tailored topcoats and jackets, derby shoes, plus a highly wantable dust bowl denim dungaree) with plenty of ravishingly burlesque-touched froufrou. The closing look was a gently green, long layered tulle-skirted dress with a pin-cinched corset. Reader, she wore a pearl necklace.
Gaytten’s Galliano came—again—as a burst of happy professional expression at the near-climax of a season that, as ever, has become bogged down in semantics. Print that!
