It was action a-go-go backstage at John Galliano. Stephen Jones was tweaking ribbons and hoiking brims; there was a last-minute walk practice to display the required pace and attitude; and then a mortified colleague accidentally walloped Bill Gaytten slap-bang in the kisser. “Call my lawyer immediately! This industry. . . .”
Pre-fracas, he’d explained this season’s inspiration was Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir’s 1975 adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s creepy girls-gone-in-the-wild, 1900s-set novel. Hadn’t that just been remade for Netflix or something? “Yes, and they should have asked us to do it, because the costumes in it are really horrible.”
When Gaytten’s version emerged—at that required, super-fast pace to the fierce, growly tempo of “I Wanna Be Your Dog”—it was the opposite of really horrible. Badass military boots and the soundtrack modernized the vibe, but from the knee northward, this was attire the students of Appleyard College for Young Ladies could only have dreamed of being issued for the term. Ruffle-bibbed pinafores in white, baby blue, or pink were paneled with lace and set with tiny pearlescent beads. Pulled-back school boaters and full-moon wire-frame spectacles completed the Australian late-Victorian-schoolgirl homage. Only the odd twist of layered asymmetry in the hem shape plus transparencies at certain junctures no ladies’ college would ever countenance undermined the illusion. There were other characters and outfits, too. Young men of means wore creamy silk blazers teamed with starched shirts over string vests and suspendered pants. Rougher types favored dirty denim work clothes in a similar silhouette, or an excellent menswear check rendered unusually in a rustic straw shade. The girls sometimes wore school blazers in regatta stripes, or donned puff-sleeved black silk jackets apparently purloined from a dowager aunt, or moonlit in lovely blue cotton-linen renderings of the boys’ suspendered workwear looks. When the dresses became too filmy, staid Galliano Gazette–print big knickers or inset blush-sparing buttoned gussets kept proceedings decent.
Backstage violence, repressed (but barely) runway sexiness, beautiful fabrication, and a sense of play and relish added up to a highly successful outing for Mr. Gaytten’s form of young ladies and gentlemen.
