It is always fascinating seeing the creative mind at work, and at chez Margiela, John Galliano’s process is laid bare as you experience the ideas being worked out and layered, piece by complex piece. In his dynamic presentation, the working methods of the haute couture were exposed—literally—in the reveal of the interfacings and magic stitchery that goes into constructing a man-tailored jacket, or in Katerina Jebb’s X-ray print photographs of garments, superimposed on other garments. Other examples of “the memory of a garment in another garment” include the Edie Beale–esque repurposing of a skirt (worn upside-down as a top) or clothes worn back to front as though put on in haste.
Clothes are crushed and squashed and mutated and shadowed beyond conventional recognition by being trapped beneath tubes of filmy nylon hosiery fabric; even feather and hair are caught within these translucent fabric sandwiches. The concept of layering was very much the backbone of this collection, as Galliano was drawn to the idea of “creating your own world within a world that’s very troubled at the moment.”
Credit: Vogue.com
