It’s now just about four years since John Galliano was hired in the fall of 2014 to lead the creative direction for Maison Martin Margiela, now just Maison Margiela. In the first few seasons, Galliano experimented with his own versions of the house codes of construction/deconstruction. Since then the designer relaunched the haute couture Artisanal line in January 2016, that combined hybrids of fine tailoring with embellishments and experimentation on what exactly is or ought to be a jacket or a coat. With his men’s and women’s fall 2018 Artisanal shows presented separately this summer, Galliano crystallized his thinking – how a thought of a garment through inventive cutting and draping can result in a different garment in what the designer called “the memory of a garment.”
Galliano said in THE MEMORY OF... With John Galliano podcast to explain himself that, "it’s like seeing the Mount Atlas with the hay and later remembering the early morning mist that recalled the mountain or a person who hadn’t been seen in a long time, but the image of her in memory remained clear." For clothes, it’s the same process, where the memory lingered and that memory may not have produced the same garment but a completely new one. That garment can be so ‘nomadic’ that a skirt can be turned upside down to become a cape, or that the specific genre of an actual physical garment can now transcend the notion of gender - “through cut and drape without having the think about specific gender is truly transformative.”
“There is no such thing as normal!” “#mutiny” “Dress as Yourself” were the messages accompanied by a black and white film of different cast of models and actresses – mutants Willow Smith, Princess Nokia, Molly Blair, Sasha Lane, Teddy Quinlivan - expressing themselves over video feed in the Grand Palais space prior to the start of the show. This expression questioned the norms of clothing for those who engender a different outlook of masculinity and femininity where the body is a work of art far beyond the historical divide of man/woman. The concept developed separately for the fall Artisanal shows now converged with one garment that may be on the verge of becoming another garment.
In terms of clothes, The show opened with a grey wool cape with slight boat neckline and cutouts on the side that probably was a memory of a long skirt converted to a ‘jacket’. With the outline of a single-breasted jacket the front vents were sewn onto the ‘cape’ worn with a knee length skirt; a black cotton cape that is becoming a pocketed coat dress in the front or a black spaghetti strap dress becoming a short sleeve on a male model; a black sheath dress with jacket suiting trims details worn by a female model.
The collection was full of great clothes – a light pink long trench, a skinny black leather coat enmeshed by a black sweater, a long black crepe coat, a high shoulder loose large lapel pantsuit, a slim fitted cropped single-breasted suit and large collar knit, several lacy sheath dresses worn with overcoats, or a gold brocade sleeveless side cut-out dress.
Although genderless clothes is not a new concept – Jean Paul Gaulier showed a collection called ‘A Wardrobe for Two’ for Spring 1985 and has in his career cross dressed both sexes – the classic men’s skirt-combo-pants for example – or Thom Browne showed practically an entire men’s show for spring-summer 2018 with buff guys all wearing light gray dresses and skirt suits of all kinds. But by questioning what should a garment be, Galliano advanced the basic idea of fashion design, a notion that even in Paris seemed like a concept of the past in this high speed digital age and how to move fashion forward through innovative and experimental concepts.
Photos courtesy of Maison Margiela
