July 6, 2016 |
C’est incroyable! How else to describe John Galliano’s latest Maison Margiela outing? This was, according to the notes, and also according to our eyes, “a modern reinvention of haute couture”. And a thoroughly modern one at that. Think of this as a woman of fine breeding, deconstructed and put back together in an explosion of colour, fabric and facepaint. To return to the notes, “evoking an illustrative line, aristocracy is decontextualized through an urban lens”. Marie Antoinette had she been dragged through time a quarter of a century and subsequently naffed off with the commoners. The shape was that classic couture silhouette – the empire line, but here it was warped and transformed into something more challenging – Galliano-fied, if you will. This was though, in the vein of Maison Margiela original vision for the Artisanal line, never about a single idea. There were beekeeper hats (which, after sporting a less that glowing visage this morning, seem like a fairly reasonable fashion choice), flashes of graffiti, a kind of silver rave-anorak, hybrid pieces that looked like your wardrobe had gone and mated with each other when your back was turned. It was a glorious collage – a uniting of Galliano and Maison Margiela’s shared vision and a brilliant, exhilarating proposal for the future of Couture…
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
