Up in the old Martin Margiela schoolhouse on the Rue St Maur, John Galliano, senior professor of fashion creativity, is acting more like a kid in the classroom. “Now, look at this white T-shirt!” he says, delightedly dangling an ostrich-feather structure from a hanger. This is a T-shirt, John? But there’s no cloth! It’s the shadow of the idea of an oversize T-shirt, maybe, but now it’s transformed into a sort of feather-boa cage, an accessory which, he declares with a flourish, is designed to be flung over “anything! Look—here—even a mackintosh!”
Galliano says he’s “inspired by the idea of proposing a new glamour—the idea of dressing in haste!” The precursor to his show was a soundtrack of airport noises—he’d been thinking about spending a day in transit at Mexico City en route from Thailand, watching travelers from all over the world passing through in various states of unintended disarray. His ability to make spontaneous, witty, poetic, madly creative leaps has made Galliano a legend. For a long time, though, his shows were all leaping: one thing to the next and the next. But now there’s focus on the Maison Margiela runway, too. Sober and patently enjoying his work again, he has a sense of fun and freedom that is increasingly being tethered to following his ideas through from beginning to end.
His notions for Spring flowed logically from the terrific experimental deconstructions of raincoats he’d shown in the Artisanal couture show in July. The show opened with more mackintoshes, cut off at the shoulder and swathed around the middle with pieces of traditional British hunting-pink gentlemen’s tailoring. So far, so collage-y, but then, sequenced in, came the absolutely wearable and wantable: a raincoat treated to fan pleating in front, an oversize camel coat, a buttery leather pea coat. And then, the glamour Galliano was talking about: a stunning gilded brocade trench coat, over which the white ostrich “T-shirt” had been belted. The purpose of buying it as a separate piece suddenly didn’t seem that far-fetched.
The girl in the pea coat was clutching a big, white, squishy pillow of a bag—an object of utilitarian delight, fully in the Martin Margiela house tradition. Another fully realized ready-to-takeaway product from this show—the happy upshot of his plane-traveler observations. There were luggage tags and plane tickets to be spotted too, attached to the backs of jackets or printed inside the pleats of a silk skirt. One poor jet-lagged passenger moved along the runway still wearing her inflatable neck-cushion.
Nobody wants to see Galliano’s imagination grounded by commerciality—but at the same time, which of his fans’ hopes haven’t been dashed in the past by the distance between his dreams and retail reality? With this season, that is no problem at all, what with the huge choice of regular outerwear, the gorgeous gold lurex fan-pleated dress, the English-tweed checked suiting, the cutoff Western booties. And yet? After this show, wouldn’t a “practical white T-shirt” be a nice thing to come across in a store, too?
