The show took place in Maison Margiela’s new building
A video screened to Maison Margiela’s digital audience before its ready-to-wear show on Sunday foreshadowed events: filmed in POV outside John Galliano’s sprawling, optical white new headquarters on Place des États-Unis in the hallowed haute couture land of the 17th arrondissement, it captured the sound of a car crash and helicopters hovering in the air. As real-life guests arrived and entered the building, we were led through rooms transformed into filmic, sensory tableaux from last summer’s epic stage production, Cinema Inferno, complete with mannequins fitted in the haute couture looks of its characters. In Galliano’s glass-roofed haute couture atelier, the life-size crash of the vintage car driven by the story’s fugitive protagonists, Count and Hen, hung in the air. They had returned! Then, we were taken to the runway…
It built on the narrative from July’s haute couture collection
In order to understand what unfolded after the prelude Galliano staged in his new building, a recap of July’s performance – which also exists in a film version on YouTube – is in order. After killing their abusive parents, star-crossed lovers Count and Hen were chased through the Arizona desert by sinister cowboys. Pregnant and wounded from a gunfight, they sought refuge in an old cinema where – bleeding and delirious – they were sucked into a cinematic loop of horror scenes founded in classic American cinema. Cut to January 2023 and we, the audience, had left them for dead, until Galliano decided to pull them out of their limbo. Imagining what the lovechild they were expecting might have looked like – an amalgamation of the aristocratic and nouveau riche characters he had created for them – he found his new ready-to-wear muse.
It was cyberpunk Americana
In a stark, mirrored catwalk room on the fifth floor of Maison Margiela’s new building, Galliano’s multi-disciplinary experience climaxed in a runway show that filtered into ready-to-wear the influences of last year’s haute couture collection. Infused with the motifs of the Cinema Inferno universe – American Western, prom night, cultish communities, teenage rebels – it materialised in what he called contemporary “cyberpunk rebels with a conscience”, with a soundtrack to match. Distinctly American fabrics and patterns like Pendleton plaid and floral barkcloth interweaved with Wild Western coats and 1950s prom dresses in a youth-tastic fusion invigorated with the spirit of cyberpunk through hacked up constructions, safety pin and soda can embellishments, and bin bag fascinator and cadet hats. Sometimes, the silhouettes evoked the memory of Galliano’s momentous graduation collection, “Les Incroyables”, which turns 40 next year.
Galliano collaborated with Disney
Where July’s haute couture collection employed Western themes as symbols of the abuse of power, this collection turned those images on their head, through a kind of subversion only Galliano could master. Outerwear had cut-outs that looked like the yokes of cowboy clothes, but on closer inspection, they were actually the silhouette of the ears of Mickey Mouse. He named it “Rorschach cutting” after the psychoanalyst, who would show his patients abstract inkblot images and ask them what they saw. The idea triggered a collaboration with Disney – the happiest place on Earth – which Galliano approached through vintage Mickey Mouse hats and T-shirts, some spliced with corsets. Other new techniques included bias-cut dresses hacked up and customised into rompers, incredible levels of splicing and fusing several garments into one, and so-called Monster Tabi-toed shoes that industrially replicated those he spliced together from several 20th-century designer shoes for haute couture.
It cemented Maison Margiela’s evolution under Galliano
Like Cinema Inferno, which completely reimagined the fashion show format, Galliano’s first ready-to-wear presentation since the pandemic was an innovative staging that drew on all the things we learned during the lockdown periods – but which most seemed to quickly forget. Not Galliano. His orchestration spliced physical and digital elements with immersive and interactive components, setting an inspiring and awesome precedent for the future of fashion shows. After the runway presentation, guests climbed the stairs to the building’s rooftop where huge billboards screened the house’s new e-commerce concept against the skyline of Paris. The experience cemented the evolution of Maison Margiela under the creative direction of Galliano, who always said he wanted to turn it into “the coolest, most cutting-edge couture house”. When he celebrates his 10th anniversary in that house in the 17th next year, it will be on the same stomping grounds that birthed some of his career’s most monumental couture collections. Mission: accomplished.
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