September 30, 2026 |
John Galliano is back – but not quite as you might have expected. For his first major project since leaving Maison Margiela in 2024, the designer has teamed up with Zara on Re{form}, a two-year creative partnership that turns his eye to the retailer’s own archive. Announced earlier this year, it marks a new chapter for a designer who has spent four decades moving between grand shows and some of the most technically inventive clothes in fashion.
The first instalment, Vol. 1 09/2026, is less a collaboration in the usual sense than a reworking of what is already there. Galliano starts with existing Zara garments, then cuts, enlarges, shrinks, splices and distorts them into something new. A shirt becomes a coat. Trousers become sculpted breeches. A lace dress becomes a jabot, while layers are stacked to conjure the illusion of outerwear. It is a familiar Galliano instinct: take something recognisable, pull it apart and make the familiar splendidly strange.
Out of that process emerge Les Incroyables and Les Merveilleuses, the rebellious dandies and divas of post-Revolutionary France – the same characters that headlined his 1984 Central Saint Martins graduate collection, the one Browns bought in full and that helped launch his career. Four decades on, they remerge in a very different setting, joined by the polished codes of the gardening wardrobe and the smoky glamour of film noir.
Each transformation comes with its own name, starting with The Flix, which layers garments to suggest the image of a coat, using an almost invisible net dress with faux-fur trims to let the wearer build their own. The Shi/ft turns one garment into another – including a Zara shirt graded up three times its size and foil-printed to resemble leather while retaining the lightness of poplin. Deep Pockets reworks a jacket’s pockets to change its posture, lending tailoring a more gestural attitude. Elsewhere come the Floating Bra, Plume Zoom and La Mouche Volant, an embroidered swarm of 18th-century flies appearing to lift from the surface of dresses and caps.
The accessories get the same Galliano makeover. Tri-Chic, a reversible sack bag with a chain strap that works three ways, reimagines the bin liner as a handbag (its name a nod to French recycling). Archival Zara shoes are stretched into elongated winklepickers and sculpted T-bar heels, while hats created with milliner Stephen Jones transform familiar forms into eccentric fisherman’s hats that are crumpled into Napoleonic bicornes and caps, acquiring beaked, bonnet-like visors.
The palette follows with the gentleman’s wardrobe of black, navy, burgundy and beige, punctuated by red; the horticultural khakis, mints and ochres of the gardening chapter; and finally the orchid pink, turquoise and acid green reminiscent of film noir.
There is an easy cynicism to the designer-meets-high-street format, and Re{form} sidesteps it. This is not simply Galliano’s name stamped onto a Zara capsule. It is an exercise in reconstruction, treating the archive as raw material and asking what happens when couture technique is applied to the everyday wardrobe. Galliano has spent much of his career reworking history. Here, he is reworking Zara’s – and making the case that something does not have to be untouched to feel entirely new again.
You can shop the collection in Zara flagship stores in Madrid and London and on zara.com, from October 1, 2026.
Photography by Steven Meisel.
