At Maison Margiela, John Galliano Tells an Epic Tale

Today, narrative theater — the type that includes characters and tales and spinning out total fantasy eventualities that require costumes — has largely fallen out of trend.

Or trend weeks, to be particular. Left behind as relics of a extra self-indulgent, lawless (much less company, relying in your perspective) time when the artistes dominated the runways. Besides that’s, at Maison Margiela, the place John Galliano remains to be engaged within the type of world constructing that’s the trend equal of a Dickens epic serial that performs on, season after season.

His Romeo and Juliet are known as Rely and Hen. Final yr, in an episode known as “Cinema Inferno,” they ran off to the Wild West of America and encountered all kinds of nefarious conditions, and this season Mr. Galliano stuffed within the again story of their mother and father, who had met throughout a trans-Atlantic passage to the US. Or so the neon define of a cruise ship on the present’s entryway indicated.

The mementos of that journey have been contained in garments — voluminous black and grey greatcoats with beneficiant draping and trapeze backs, bias-cut robes, full petticoats and little camisoles — handed down over the generations, more and more frayed and customised. Ta-da: assortment!

Stiff white collars had change into indifferent from their shirts to behave like scarves, one pointed finish jutting out to the facet as if it had frozen in an infinite ocean breeze. Attire, the tops peeled right down to type the waistbands of the skirts and expose the corseted underpinnings, seemed as if that they had been laminated for preservation, folded and unfolded time and again till the creases painted their very own image.

One skirt had a bustle structured through duct tape. Wool trousers have been truncated on the knee, the hems rolled as much as type a New Look-like flounce. Baggage have been veiled by tulle, like recollections. It was all very desiccated aristo — however with a recycled, or upcycled, edge.

That’s what makes Mr. Galliano’s present work so fascinating, and why it appears so related, regardless of its whiff of the previous. He’s taken the dramatic instruments of yore and given them a twist that speaks instantly to the current day: to the that means of sustainability, the fabric considerations of trend and the very downside of stuff (an excessive amount of of it).

It’s a genuinely artistic manner of addressing critical up to date considerations. One which concurrently is terribly enjoyable to observe and appears equally fascinating to put on.