“Restorative!” John Galliano declaimed. “The idea of giving something a new life…Kick-starting a new consciousness.” These were some of the resoundingly enthusiastic phrases Galliano poured into ears after his fall show via the post-show podcast he’s started to release in lieu of backstage interviews. The highly stylized recording explained what Galliano has been up to since we saw his Maison Margiela Artisanal show in January. In a gleeful glissando of cadences, he made up his own word for the recycling experiments he began then, and is now funneling into an official house label, which lists provenance and other details. “Recicla! Retch-ee-cla!” he cried. “The joy, the joy that we will be able to sell these pieces among the rest of the collection just thrills me.”
But before anything else, there was Galliano’s treat for the eyes to take in: an immersion in his unique color-sense. Who else could pull off a palette that put tangerine next to brown and mustard, orange with pale mauve and electric blue, then could suddenly switch from odd pastels to an intense splash of red and deep shades of forest green? Cornflower blue, absinthe, loden green, turquoise, teal, primary yellow, and brown bordeaux, running from fragile chiffon washes to punchy solids—it was painterly, masterful. Galliano may have credited Edward Hopper’s paintings as his starting point, but his orchestration of innovative cutting and texture—by turns bold and delicate—took it somewhere all of his own.
It was beautiful to look at, this extension of the cutting up and re-sectioning of “bourgeois” classics that he’d begun with the haute couture cycle. Galliano has talked of wanting to retrieve and hold onto the fragments of meaning that remain in the fading memories of the 20th-century wardrobe. The finale dress, a delicate thing made from laser-stamped lavender chiffon, was the “ghost” of a 1920s flapper dress floating back from a century ago.
The difference now is the purchase this collection has on 21st-century reality. Galliano’s “Recicla” label is a step on from the “Replica” reeditions of vintage clothing that Martin Margiela originated at the house, making sure to print the date of provenance on the label. Galliano’s purpose in studying vintage pieces is different: He lops and excavates structures to discover new forms, often “freeze-framing” work in progress. And so, with this collection, “Instead of slavishly copying” he decided that studio-reworked charity shop finds deserve to be sold as they are. “Now I’m feeling a little braver,” he said. “The idea is that this voyage of discovery supports this feeling of being inventive with a conscience.”
Galliano has often stood accused of being up in his own ivory tower, tossing out high-flown concepts that are never destined to land in stores. But this is something different, in a different time. The way the world has turned, the revaluation of limited-edition clothes and accessories made from waste and leftover materials—things that are touched by human hands and are not identically mass-produced—well, that is shaping up to be the new definition of luxury. Selling under the Recicla label will be the wicker bags, which Galliano and his team “restored, from the ’20s through the ’70s,” and the 52C signature handbags—which are made entirely from offcut leathers that come from the manufacturing of other people’s bags.
As Galliano succinctly concluded, all these efforts amount to a societal change that has been a long time coming, and now feels urgently right. “It’s a return to worth, to all those things we believe in.”