In the podcast with which John Galliano explains and articulates the thoughts behind his wildly imaginative new Maison Margiela Artisanal collection, the designer waxes lyrical on the subject of decadence in art, film, literature—and life.
Galliano defines decadence as “the excess, the artifice, the decay,” and for him, it takes many forms. It could be the gesture of the late Isabella Blow, for instance, when she used to wipe down her desk at Vogue at the end of the day in Chanel No.5 or the character of Jean des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 novel A Rebours (who was said to have been largely based on the outrageously decadent Proustian aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou) or Baudelaire’s idea of dreams becoming reality or, indeed, the unstoppable consumption and the tsunami of visual information crashing down on the kids of Generation Z.
All these elements and references were thrown into the Galliano-Margiela centrifuge and paraded against an eye-popping graffitied backdrop conceived by the Margiela studio. Evocative of the hallucinogenic dayglow room created by Kenny Scharf at the cusp of the 1980s at the East Village radical fashion and art spot Club 57 (and recently re-created at MoMA), it featured a repeating image of a clipped poodle in Yves Klein blue which reminded this reviewer at least of the pet poodle that Galliano’s friend and fellow Central Saint Martins’s student, the artist David Harrison, used to dye shocking pink.
The opening looks—gender fluid, like the entire collection—replicated that visually chaotic mural as a print using any number of inventive treatments, from traditional hand-embroideries and feather fronds to state-of-the-art reflective fabrics, often combined to create a shimmering effect as though you had looked too hard at the sun and then closed your eyes. With mirror underfoot to fracture and multiply the looks, the effect was even more discombobulating and powerful.
Then, Galliano began to cleanse the palate with traditional menswear tailoring pieces using fabrics inspired by the weathered backdrops utilized by Irving Penn for his iconic portraits and still life photographs. “Everything’s been done,” Galliano explains, “and then you want to cleanse.” In classic Galliano at Margiela style, however, that doesn’t lead to straightforward simplicity. Instead, those conventional elements have migrated to unexpected places to create entirely new shapes—“altering reality to create a new reality” as Galliano explains it—so that, thanks to “the fearlessness of a couturier’s scissors,” a trenchcoat is cut into skateboard shorts, and the front of a velvet jacket morphs into a black lace shift dress onto which it has been grafted. The radical displacements meant that a jacket’s pocket flaps, usually located at hip level, became epaulettes or sleeve cuffs instead, or the waistband of classic men’s tailored pants were transformed into a jacket’s stand-away raised neckline that evoked a mid-century haute couture gesture. What Galliano politely calls a “combinaison” but admits is essentially a “onesie” becomes the most gender fluid garment of all.
Meanwhile, a basic I ♡ NY tee became the back of a jacket whose revers and shoulders were decorated with the reinforcement stitching conventionally hidden by the tailors beneath subsequent layers of fabric, and the sturdy sleeves of a heavy winter coat were grafted onto the body of a lightweight jacket fastened not with buttons but with dainty satin ribbons like an 18th-century corset’s ties, evoking the world of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and reminding one of the cyclical nature of decadence.
Galliano gleefully confesses that he is “feeling so much energy in the world,” and with this startling collection, he manages to channel that rush into clothing in a way that challenges and reimagines what haute couture can be in 2019.
