Which way to navigate through these stormy times on the good ship fashion: go madly, colorfully into the roiling overload and political non sequiturs of daily experience or cut through it all with focus and sobriety? It’s as if we’re witnessing fashion charting the desperate global landscape before our eyes this season as we spectate on shows that choose between those either-or routes. At Maison Margiela, however, John Galliano’s compass is set to gyrate between the two. What can come after decadence? Austerity, of course. To the strains of Swan Lake.
That was the impact of his fall intro: the sudden shock of calm, coherence, and beautifully constructed coats. After his summer haute couture show, Artisanal, in which jolting, eye-confusing, giant blue poodle-d excess practically tossed the idea of recognizable garments over the side, he took a 180-degree ready-to-wear turn in the direction of sober tailoring.
That sounds basic, but thumbs up, it was amazing. Tailoring—coats, trouser suits, skirtsuits—is indubitably on fashion’s agenda this season. That already sets a competition running for who can be the first to grab a customer’s commitment to investing in this new-yet-trad form of garb. It takes a designer with an arsenal of hands-on skills in their repertoire, like Galliano, to pull it off and yet still look like themselves. He can take shears to cut a slightly waisted, charcoal-gray double-breasted herringbone coat and implant it with wide, black, felted sleeves seemingly culled from masculine militaria, and then clinch its desirability with what Savile Row tailors term a pronounced “shoulder roll.”
He can also cut in the upside down and the inside out, leave the shadows of one garment on another and fillet skirts (or trenchcoats, or whatever they may have been) so that only the framework of former hems swings free below the knee.
The many tedious descriptors for that class of inventiveness comes down to this: You know it when you see it. But who is seeing? The eyes of the millennials and Gen Z-ers who hero-worship Galliano today might recognize themselves in the way he has lifted aspirations, erasing the commonplaces of streetwear and gender categorizations they grew up with. With his crew of student interns on work placement from his alma mater, Central Saint Martins, Galliano’s inclusive gang-sourced intel is sparking that new energy.
He called this a “co-ed” collection and (again) opened it with the trans teenage Londoner Finn Buchanan. This time, he was wearing a plain black, knee-length single-breasted coat with sloping shoulders, black rubber Mary Janes, and old-lady stocking socks. Ticking off who was where on the sliding scale of gender identity felt idiotically redundant (beside the point, old!) as Galliano’s suiting—belted, high-heeled, and trailing tailor’s tacks—kept coming.
Non-binary is a watchword within gender politics today. If only it could be embraced beyond the example set by youth, beyond the fashion community which celebrates it, and into politics, we might get somewhere. Thanks, John Galliano, you’ll sell even better next season, but you also made us think of this.