“When I returned to designing, I was taken aback by how everyone was seeing shows through their phones,” John Galliano said at a preview this week. The Maison Margiela Artisanal show reflected that phone-camera/social-media phenomenon literally. As Galliano’s collection walked, audience members were asked to turn their cameras to flash—each capturing their own images of fabrics as they strobed and refracted into high-tech prismatic rainbows as they moved. “Freezing the glamour of the accidental, the magical moment,” Galliano called it—another stage in the progression of his thoughts about “dressing in haste.”
Speed, technology, and the fast-forwarding fractured chaos of modern consciousness were the subtexts of this couture collection. It was formatted as a double-vision experience: The human eye showed one reality, the screen another—the before and after are paired in the photographs you see here. Well, isn’t that the way we live today, our brains trained to judge every event and every environment according to how they’ll look on Instagram?
So far, social media has impacted fashion houses by forcing them to alter sets to make shows Instagram-friendly, but this was a long step further, affecting the actual R & D of clothes and materials. “It’s quite scientific,” Galliano explained. “We recorded every moment of what we were making, then looked at the photographs and altered what we were doing according to the photos.” The reaction of polyurethane to camera flash and the illusionary visuals that happen when holographic material is layered over polka dots or chinoiserie jacquards were all factored in.
Retro-fitting, you could call it. The really interesting part of the whole exercise is that realizing this picture of fractured, insta-turboed consciousness actually depended on age-old, passed-down skills. On people who can sew, cut, and embroider; who physically make the seemingly impossible appear before our very eyes. “I find that very moving,” said Galliano.
The in-house Margiela atelier was hard at work up to the night before. As intent as he was to evoke the impression of sporty, casual clothing and a chopped-up, falling-apart spontaneity, there was no random throwing-on about it. Slip dresses were integrated into parkas; the wadding of a transparent puffa was composed of hand-painted feathers. There always has to be a pièce de résistance in an haute couture show. In this one, it was a regular blue technical outdoor anorak-gown that seamlessly blended its shredded hem into the twisted copper fan pleats of an evening skirt. In a way, it said everything about our culture’s haste—realized in the the concept that a hybridized garment can be shrugged on as quickly as a sweatshirt. In another sense? The anorak-gown read as the perfect consummation of the intellect and skills of two very different rule breakers and agenda setters: Martin Margiela and John Galliano.
In looking forward, it carried, as Galliano said, “the memory” of garments past—a crinoline bustle-cage and lacy lingerie bras included. In days gone by, Galliano often faked up these kinds of multi-everything looks, without pausing before he did the next thing. Sober now, he’s focused on methodically seeing this R & D work through so that it feeds all the other lines of Maison Margiela. Insta-transforming fabric will be available sooner rather than later, he promises. “So people can really buy it. That’s my job!”
