John Galliano's spring 2024 Artisanal collection for Maison Margiela is sure to be remembered in history books, collected by museums, pored over by design students, and possibly extinguish the silent giant of luxury with the tsunami of powerful emotions and enthusiasm of the fashion that unleashed.
It was a theatrical tour de force akin to a Toulouse Lautrec painting come to life: curly-haired ladies staggering through a ramshackle hall with its jumble of chairs, worn floors and tables strewn with overturned magnums. This mixed-gender show, as vivid and gripping as an Imax feature film, also featured men stalking the room like fugitives, clutching their coats around their tiny waists.
The discomfort caused by the extreme corseted waists was mitigated by the enormous pathos evoked by these characters: a wet, shivering man under a broken umbrella; another almost doubles over in apparent hunger; one woman in a grandiose trench coat that looked like it was made of worn cardboard, another in a shrunken suit and tattered tights who nervously removed her hat repeatedly, revealing the bandages and cast covering her head.
The clothes were beautiful: sheer dresses with bias cuts and squiggles of silver embroidery, or dense accumulations of godets; crinkled urchin suits, tight and tucked in for maximum glamour, and floaty mermaid dresses that revealed the models' enhanced Jessica Rabbit and Merkins figures.
Front-row guests Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner watched with wide eyes as these proud, inebriated ladies swung their swollen butts among the tight, confusing rows of spectators.
With an unlit match between their teeth and their faces shining, the men emerged from the wet and stormy night in beautiful tweed coats and wrap-around trench coats.
Intrigued by “Brassaï’s voyeuristic portrait,” Galliano had decided to explore the “vulnerable side of Paris” and its nocturnal revelers, according to the press notes.
The setting couldn't have been more atmospheric: the abandoned speakeasy painstakingly built under the Alexander III Bridge, with half the audience sitting outside under the bridge at café tables. Inside, thunder rumbled during the hour-long wait for the show to begin, when antique mirrors finally came to life as video monitors, broadcasting a short, choppy film noir about fetish corset fitting, lust, and jewelry theft.
Each outfit was a marvel of imagination and craftsmanship, and when actress Gwendoline Christie finished the circuit in her kinky fit-and-flare latex dress, photographers shouted “Bravo” and filmmaker Baz Luhrmann joined the audience in stomping. with delight.
Closing out a couture week full of safe, customer-friendly clothing, Galliano returned the rare quest to its original R&D purpose, press notes detailing a litany of new techniques developed over the past year, some involving boiling and gluing, other inlays and complex thread work.
One technique is called “emotional cutting,” which involves imbuing garments “with the unconscious gestures that shape our expressions: a hut placed over the head in the rain, a flap raised to cover the face, a pair of pants raised to avoid a puddle. of water”. .”
With this moving and unforgettable show, Galliano reaffirmed that he is still above the rest.
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