How Galliano turned memory into a new language for Margiela
By Spring/Summer 2019, John Galliano had reached a point at Maison Margiela where the house’s original language and his own were beginning to feel almost inseparable. Four years after arriving as creative director, he was no longer simply applying Margiela’s ideas of deconstruction and transformation to his own work. He was building an entirely new vocabulary from them, using clothing to question where garments belonged, what they were supposed to represent and, increasingly, who was supposed to wear them.
Shown in Paris on September 26, 2018, Spring/Summer 2019 centered on a simple statement Galliano made backstage: “It doesn’t matter who wears it.” Rather than approaching gender fluidity by putting menswear on women or dresses on men, Galliano wanted to remove that distinction from the garment itself. Pieces were fitted across different bodies, with traditional ideas of masculine and feminine dress treated less like rules than raw material to be rearranged.
The idea was personal for Galliano. Long before Dior, Givenchy or even his own label, he had been part of London’s early 1980s club scene while studying at Central Saint Martins. Nights at places like the Cha Cha Club and Camden Palace existed in a world where clothing was already being used to destabilize gender. Women appeared in oversized zoot suits and sharp quiffs while men wore skirts, makeup and Marcel waves. Boy George and Leigh Bowery emerged from the same culture, where getting dressed could be performance, provocation and self-invention all at once.
Galliano was watching a younger generation arrive at similar conclusions almost four decades later. Conversations with the young people working inside the Margiela studio had already informed his Spring 2019 menswear collection, where he began pushing couture construction into traditionally male wardrobes and describing a changing understanding of sensuality and sexuality. By the women’s ready-to-wear show in September, that thinking had developed into something broader. Instead of dividing the collection by gender, Galliano treated the wardrobe as one shared system.
Memory became the bridge between the two generations. Contemporary versions of “Tainted Love” played during the show, returning Galliano to 1981, when Soft Cell’s version was part of the soundtrack to the London clubs he was frequenting while still a student. He described the collection as being built through memory rather than conventional mood boarding, pulling from things he had actually worn, seen and lived through rather than assembling a new fantasy from references.
The clothes began with some of the most established codes in Western dress: Crombie coats, trenches, tailored jackets, tapered trousers, cardigans and eveningwear. Galliano then began moving their parts around.
He called the process “nomadic couture.” A garment no longer had to remain attached to its original purpose. A swimsuit could become a dress. A trench could function as a dress rather than outerwear. The sleeves of a cardigan appeared to wrap around a coat but were actually built into its construction. A party dress could sit like a shadow over a traditional men’s jacket. Crombie coats were opened into cape forms, their sleeves reduced to suggestions through seams rather than functioning conventionally.
It was a particularly Margiela way of talking about identity. Martin Margiela had built the house by questioning the accepted anatomy of clothing, exposing linings, reversing construction, enlarging patterns and allowing garments or objects to become something other than what they had originally been designed to be. Galliano was carrying that logic further. If a coat did not have to remain a coat and a swimsuit did not have to remain a swimsuit, the idea that either belonged exclusively to a particular gender began to look equally arbitrary.
Galliano also returned to one of the techniques that had defined his career long before Margiela: cutting on the bias. Traditionally associated with fluid womenswear, bias cutting allows fabric to fall diagonally across the body rather than following the rigid structure of the grain. Galliano applied that softness to tailoring, allowing suits to twist and drape in ways that undermined the stiffness traditionally associated with menswear. Golden brocade bustiers and pieces resembling vintage beaded evening dresses appeared alongside tight trousers and formal tailoring, collapsing couture, clubwear and traditional men’s dress into the same silhouette.
There was also a larger idea of rebellion surrounding the show. Spring 2019 coincided with the launch of Mutiny, Galliano’s first fragrance for Maison Margiela. Before the runway began, films featuring Teddy Quinlivan, Hanne Gaby Odiele, Sasha Lane, Willow Smith, Molly Bair and Princess Nokia were projected throughout the space. Each had been selected to represent individuality and a refusal to conform, making the fragrance campaign almost a prologue to the collection itself.
That refusal to accept fixed categories moved from identity into technology.
One of the collection’s most memorable images was also one of its strangest: smartphones attached directly to models’ ankles in industrial-looking holders, often strapped around towering platform boots. The accessory had first appeared in Galliano’s Fall 2018 Artisanal collection, where iPhones mounted to the leg were used by models to record the audience as they walked. That couture show also included virtual reality headsets and iPads embedded into bags, reflecting Galliano’s fascination with a generation that increasingly carried its entire world through devices.
For Spring 2019, the ankle-mounted phone returned just days after Apple released the iPhone XS. At almost exactly the same moment, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced that they were leaving the company. Galliano was presenting clothes to a fashion audience already experiencing much of the runway through phone screens, then physically attaching that screen to the body.
The phone became less of an accessory than a prosthetic.
That detail tied into a larger obsession developing inside Galliano’s Margiela. He was increasingly interested in the difference between what something looked like in reality and what it became once mediated through a camera or screen. His collections around this period experimented heavily with reflective materials, digital imagery, projection and surfaces that behaved differently when photographed. The idea would continue into his later Artisanal work, where he described contemporary life as if people were constantly moving through projections and filters.
The ankle phone therefore was not simply a futuristic styling gimmick. It represented a body whose relationship with technology had become so intimate that the device was beginning to feel physically attached to it.
That tension ran throughout Spring/Summer 2019. Old tailoring met new technology. Galliano’s memories of 1980s London collided with Generation Z. Victorian clothing structures appeared beside latex, reflective surfaces and smartphones. Couture techniques were used to dismantle distinctions between menswear and womenswear. Familiar garments remained recognizable, but only barely.
Even Galliano’s position at Margiela made the collection significant. When he joined the house in 2014, he seemed almost like the opposite of its founder. Martin Margiela had built a mythology around anonymity and restraint. Galliano had spent much of his career as one of fashion’s most visible showmen, constructing enormous historical narratives at Givenchy, Dior and his namesake label.
Over time, however, Galliano stopped trying to reproduce Margiela’s past and instead began absorbing its way of thinking. Techniques such as décortiqué, nomadic cutting and later Recicla became part of the internal language he developed at the house. Rather than copying Margiela’s famous deconstructed garments, he embraced the deeper principle behind them: that clothing could be questioned, taken apart and rebuilt according to a different logic.
Spring/Summer 2019 captures the moment when that transformation became especially clear.
Galliano was looking backward at himself as a young man in London while simultaneously looking toward a generation growing up through smartphones, social media and changing definitions of gender. What connected those worlds was the belief that clothing could be used to escape prescribed identities.
The tailoring could become a dress. The dress could become a coat. The masculine could become feminine without fully becoming either. A phone could leave the hand and become part of the leg.
Nothing was required to stay where it had been placed.
And beneath all of the technical language, warped tailoring and strange accessories, that was the collection’s real proposition. Galliano was not asking men to dress like women or women to dress like men. He was suggesting that the categories themselves were beginning to matter less.
At Maison Margiela Spring/Summer 2019, the garment was allowed to move freely.
So was the person inside it.
