John Galliano, one of the most influential, and controversial, designers of the 21st century and former creative director of Christian Dior and Maison Margiela, hasn’t had a show during Paris Fashion Week since January 2024.
That was when he unveiled a Maison Margiela couture collection in a one-night only club built under a bridge in Paris, which seemed to bring the city of the 1930s back from another dimension and is still discussed as a transcendent experience by many who were there. Since then, however, he left Margiela and hasn’t been much in the news at all — at least until late this past summer.
When, in quick succession, The New York Times revealed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s plans for a 2027 Galliano retrospective at the Costume Institute; the museum announced the show; and a backlash forced its postponement.
The news had disinterred Galliano’s history of drunken anti-Semitic and anti-Asian rants (the ones that got him fired from Dior), as well as allegations regarding a similar incident in 2019. That provoked an increasingly critical response from the Met community about honoring the designer in a time of growing anti-Semitism, making it untenable for the exhibition to go on.
On Wednesday night, however, Galliano returned — both to the Paris fashion scene and to his creative comfort zone. Albeit not in the way anyone might have expected.
Instead of a catwalk, he reimagined a warren of rooms in an old hôtel particulier in the Marais, converting them into a fun house of sorts, like a stand-in for the interiors of his mind. A room containing sketchbooks and 18th-century bonnets and a tiny statue of Napoleon under glass gave way to a room as hot as a sauna with images of high-speed trains roaring past, which gave way to a “lab” filled with sewing machines and antique mahogany desks that had been fused together, around which stood an entire assortment of garments in the process of being transformed.
Which in turn led to a pop-up store featuring a 157-piece collection of men’s and women’s wear that came courtesy not of yet-another luxury brand, but … Zara. Yes, the fast-fashion company. Officially called Re(form) Zara Authored by Couturier John Galliano, the collection may turn out to be one of the more consequential of the week. Even with that ridiculous name.
(Zara has not commented on the Met decision, and no one was available to speak at the fashion week event. But as far as the contorted name goes, it may have something to do with the fact that LVMH owns the John Galliano brand.)
The collaboration had been teased in March, when Zara introduced plans for a two-year project with Galliano in which he would “re-author the brand’s archives” over four seasons. What that meant at the time was unclear — was he upcycling old stock? Remaking old patterns? Just banking his money and going through the same old motions? — but the answer was pretty simple.
He has taken pre-existing basics like overcoats, slip dresses and shirts (the kind found in any apparel inventory) and used them as blank canvases into which he could splice shards of history, romance and reverie, much as he did in his previous jobs, weaving whole novels into garments out of references and materials. What if the rebels of the French Revolution, the czarinas of Tolstoy’s Russia, and the flappers and gentlemen of the Stork Club met up in the afterworld and had a hoedown while debating Voltaire and slamming back some absinthe?
A naval greatcoat was chopped away at the front to make it resemble a tailcoat, the edges left raw; a soft heather tweed crombie lined in olive green canvas and crunched into turned-up curves at the edges, as if it had been caught in a wind. Black netting was cut into a generic overdress and trimmed in faux fox fur, so it looked like the shadow of a garment that could then be layered over any other piece, as desired, to turn it into a memory.
There was an assortment of bias-cut slip dresses in more net and trimmed in rosettes and ribbons, and an oversize white shirt with the back of the collar pinched down to create a set of folds on either side of the spine like wings. There was a relatively classic tuxedo and an oversize canvas Charlie Chaplin suit. There were lots of ways to play with identity. There was also a garbage-bag handbag, which we could do without.
There were even some fussy new terms to describe all of this, the way Galliano had invented fussy new terms to describe his work at Margiela: “In-Cut-Yable” (the technique of turning classic coats into cutaways); “the Flix” (for layering); and so on.
What there were not were corsets of any kind, or any other kind of other body-modifying garment. For once with Galliano, functionality had not been completely sacrificed to fantasy — whether because of production or price limitations was unclear. But it made these clothes seem more contemporary than they often had when he was free to indulge his more extreme impulses.
On opening night, the makeup artist Pat McGrath, the stylist Tonne Goodman, the actor Lou Doillon and the model/activist Amber Valletta were all browsing and buying.
The collection ranges from $29.99 for an accessory such as a tulle collar or lace jabot to $999 for a strapless black evening dress composed of hundreds of georgette petals. Many of the coats — the best part of the collection — are around the $500 mark.
It is, in other words, not exactly fast nor very cheap nor rooted in trend (and thus disposable). Instead it is the sort of in-between offering that has been missing from fashion for awhile, as high-end brands have chased the luxury consumer via increasingly exorbitant prices and ultra-fast-fashion competitors have raced one another to the bottom.
Like Baisi Guadagnino — another collaboration Zara unveiled during the Milan collections featuring a midcentury fabulous line of furniture and clothes from the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and his production designer, Stefano Baisi — Re(form) Zara takes the old concept of one-off designer partnerships with mass fashion brands to different level. And redefines the whole idea of accessible fashion in a notably qualitative way.
It was also a reminder that, when it comes to Galliano, canceling (or delaying) the Met show was not the same as canceling the man or his work. And that, in fact, it might have been better for the Met to hold off on the exhibition in the first place, not just because of the political and cultural climate of the times and Galliano’s problematic past. But because as a designer, he isn’t done.
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