John Galliano triumphs at Maison Margiela to close Paris haute couture

Maison Margiela rounded out the Parisian couture season Thursday night with a sensational John Galliano collection and a fascinating spectacle: a brilliant vision of Parisian history that would have delighted Balzac or Victor Hugo.

The audience stamped their feet and applauded almost deafeningly at the end, begging Galliano to take a bow. However, maintaining a tradition started by the house's founder, Martin Margiela, who never bowed and avoided being photographed, Galliano remained behind a gold curtain backstage.

Staged inside a vaulted warehouse just below the Alexander III Bridge, the show starred a series of unlikely French archetypes: curvy courtesans, Moulin Rouge molls, supplicating dolls, nocturnal gamblers and cat burglars.

Everyone excited, spinning and twirling around the array of cheap chairs, ragged coffee tables, police wanted signs, broken lights, and a beat-up pool table. And before bistro mirrors, which became flat screens; The best thing will be to appreciate a passionate opening performance by French singer and Freddie Mercury lookalike, Lucky Love. He had wandered around the space dressed in a gentleman's coat before the show, before stripping to reveal his torso, which was missing his left arm, to begin singing his cult hit 'Now I Do n't Need'. Your Love'.

A crime drama and a jewel theft was suddenly projected on the screens: stilettos on broken glass, couples tying their corsets, and a thief who gave the heroine a pearl necklace inside a dirty brasserie in the Latin Quarter.

Then the action came to life. With the arrival of a young dandy without a shirt, with pleated pants and a waist microcorset. Him thrilling along the Seine in the pouring rain, to march under the arches of the most beautiful bridge in Paris. Turning to 50 other guests outside at the bistro tables before entering the warehouse.

Several partners left Pigalle a century ago: a World War I veteran turned spy with military medals, who recalled Johnny Depp in 'Alice in Wonderland', or burlesque dancers who would have thrilled Toulouse-Lautrec .

With waxy makeup and deranged eyes, the cast felt like the ghosts of the Seine, or the inhabitants who still sleep along the river's banks today, many of them under the same bridge where the show took place.

An almost hallucinatory piece of performance art, with quilted cocoon jackets covered in shards and strands of tulle; or golden satin dresses with bustles worthy of a Venetian courtesan.

All the way to a notable decadent countess in a toga and corrugated cardboard hat, echoing Galliano's famous 1984 graduation show, 'Les Incroyables' which referenced the Royal Palace during the French Revolution. Or a trio of burlesque dancers in sheer black gowns over hand-painted abstract expressionist body stockings. Their faces were stained. Their hats twisted and tied with knots.

Among the madness were many bright garments: for girls, extremely sexy knitted and beaded columns, crinkled herringbone wool jackets or transparent corset dresses that will be enormously influential. All this combined with gradient tights, surely another of the new trends. Filling coming out of the tights, as if these Margiela experts were old, worn-out dolls.

For the boys, Demob' suits with divinely cut chalk stripes; fantastic swagger coats; worn by reprobates with motorcycle glasses.

Climaxing with Gwendoline Christie in a latex crinoline over a Delph blue corset, her neck and hands covered, like other ladies, with a porcelain collar and skeleton-shaped hands.

In an otherwise safe couture season, with more attention devoted to the front row rather than the runway, it seemed irrelevant that Kris, Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian were at the show.

Three decades ago, at Sao Schlumberger's mansion in St. Germain, a nearly bankrupt Galliano starred in one of the biggest fashion moments of the '90s. I was among a handful of people in tonight's audience who attended that seductive meeting of Japanese Zen and Chinoiserie. Today, on the banks of the Seine, John starred in the best haute couture fashion moment so far this decade.

In between, John was unceremoniously fired from Christian Dior in 2011, after making that house a giant fortune over a decade. For a terribly ugly drunken rant outside his apartment that went viral, he paid an enormously high price: Dior gave him no compensation; the French establishment stripped him of his Legion of Honor; and he was the target of fierce attacks in the sensational media.

So tonight felt like his final resurrection. Like the cast of this show who survived and won through rebellion and sheer audacity. Another reason for the tumultuous applause and stomping at the end.

Resurrexit Sicut Dixit.