John Galliano promised that the grand unveiling of his Maison Margiela Artisanal film for fall 2020—50 minutes of it, no less—was going to have a thriller subplot. Fashion detectives will be hashing over every scene for what he meant by that by now. Well, it actually involved veils, marble nymphs, and a trail of historical inspiration that wound back through his own past, connected with Martin Margiela’s work, and culminated in a kind of elegiac digital fantasia.
More than anything, though, the thrill of the narrative was just seeing Galliano in action with his team, researching, cutting, sewing—and everything else it takes over intense hours and weeks of work to make an idea come to life.
Through documentary information captured every which way by Nick Knight—on body-cams, surveillance cameras, drones, Zoom calls, phone texts, and Google searches—we saw how he orchestrates every step of the process. Briefing his young team, he made a revelatory link between images of 19th century virtuoso sculptures of women in barely-there drapery, and catwalk pictures of his own Fallen Angels collection of spring 1986—a show of muslin empire-line dresses which he’d sent out dampened, to cling to the body. Then—in a brilliant twist—he brought in a direct comparison to Martin Margiela’s method of crushing a t-shirt under a sheer layer of stocking material. Voila! Another example of ‘frozen’ drapery which goes right back to the foundations of the house.
So then he was off, leading members of his atelier in intensive sessions of draping, circular cutting, and pinning a chiffon dress on a veiled model: “the highest, highest form of dressmaking,” as he gleefully declared. There was a riveting moment in which the development became balletic; delicate Njinksy-like chiffon leggings and ballet slippers evolved into Tabi-ballet shoes. “I’m hungry for beauty!” he exclaimed in the podcast Maison Margiela sent out in conjunction with the film.
Hungry to make the past relevant to today’s situation, too. At a time when nightlife is completely off-limits for young people, he chatted through his memories and images of the Blitz-kid clubbing days of early ’80s London, the era when New Romantics made up extreme looks from chopped-up vintage clothes: Steve Strange, Boy George, Jeremy Healy, Stephen Jones. His friend, the DJ Princess Julia, made a cameo appearance, reminiscing about how a feeding frenzy broke out when a theatrical costumer closed down, and threw the stuff out on the street. Pat McGrath turned up on screen with her try-out for Blitz kid-inspired wiggly-eyebrow face painting.
It sketched in the background for the ‘Recicla’ dimension of the Artisanal collection—Galliano’s excavation and reconstruction of the innards of charity shop clothes: “our sustainability stand!” as he put it. A tailored jacket is seen being expertly sliced into and remade. “This is modern couture today, not just dressing the elite!” he declared. “Make do and mend!” The Margiela models act up a storm on the in-house runway. A vintage matchbox is found, purporting to date from the time that the Maison Margiela premises were a nightclub. Galliano decrees, “Let’s have a Zoom party!”
It’s touching, watchable, and incredibly revealing of all the time-consuming, specialist skills of all the people who play their part, in the studio and remotely, to make Galliano’s collections a fantastical reality. Beautiful and exceptional things can still be created, even in our melancholy, fearful times, he seems to be saying. “It’s a love-letter to the atelier.”
