“Would you like to talk a walk with me, offline?” John Galliano reveals the story behind his momentous Maison Margiela 2024 Artisanal Collection

A text by Anders Christian Madsen

The day after the Maison Margiela 2024 Artisanal show in January, the fashion critic Sarah Mower sent me a poetic message. Enclosing a screengrab of look 28—a ghostly, fauvist silhouette draped in ethereal layers of aquarelle-painted tulles—she simply wrote: “Who was she? Was she even there?” One of the most viral moments of the digital fashion age, audiences were still absorbing John Galliano’s haunting theatre months after its curtain call. Kids were playing runway dress-up on social media mimicking his designs, journalists were writing teary-eyed testimonials on how they’d never thought they’d see a show like it, and—most telling of its effect—there was an insatiable interest in dissecting the actual pieces that made up the looks. In the time after, the words Mower had sent me echoed in my mind.

The impact of this haute couture collection wasn’t only a reaction to mind-blowing fashion but to the mystery that shrouded Galliano’s drama: the enigmatic and elusive characters created through his dressmaking and the obscure story that unfolded in that brasserie under a moonlit Pont Alexandre III. As tradition prescribes at Maison Margiela, Galliano didn’t take a bow after the show, nor did he explain his collection to the press backstage. For months, his beguiled audiences were left to wonder—as Mower had—where those hypnotising characters came from. Were they friendly, sinister, happy, disturbed? In the age of over-explanation, Galliano’s silence fuelled the mystery that shaped the momentum. Five months after the milestone show, I asked him if he would finally indulge my curiosity.

In the wake of the show, he had participated in a previously-filmed personal documentary and ruled the red carpet of a Met Gala practically dedicated to his career. Everybody was talking about John Galliano the designer, but I wanted to know about John Galliano the storyteller. What created that show? Who were those characters? On a morning in late May, we sit down in his Artisanal workspace on Place des États-Unis, its walls—normally optical white—still painted black from the post-show exhibition that took place there. He is wearing a boiled-wool cardigan over a t-shirt, skater shorts and chunky sneakers, and his blonde corkscrew curls are poking out from under a battered cap. Surrounded by books on Brassaï—whose photographs inspired the collection—and with his pliage booklet comprising the show’s looks in hand, he takes a deep breath, turns to me and exhales: “Good Lord, how did it all happen?”

Then, Galliano tells me his story. “When I first moved to Paris, I didn’t realise it was so much smaller. Often people would say, ‘Oh, just jump over the bridge!’ So, I walked. I walked. I walked everywhere. Everything was very near and I became obsessed with the banks of the Seine. I still jog there and see it around the clock: the early morning, the characters, the people that have chosen to live that way; a Chinese wedding in the afternoon; the evening when everything gets painted with impressionistic dabbles of light refracting from the Bateaux Mouches. And how it becomes a completely different, gorgeous world: thick, oily, velvet blues and blacks; the pink Hausmann stone with the gold leaf blinging out; the street lights… It’s a very beautiful world,” he says, his voice majestic, his words precise. Speaking off the cuff, he somehow makes every line sound like poetry.

A rediscovery of the early- and mid-century Parisian street photography of Brassaï made Galliano see the city’s characters in a different light. Quite literally. “Brassaï wandered around the night-time and came across these amazing characters. He enhanced some of the lighting and the shadows, which is what I found appealing. I was in his world: the smoky, tobacco-stained, glossy, painted wallpaper; the magic of Madame Bijou and all these characters he shot in a very sympathetic way; non-judgemental. If you look at the pictures, it’s just, like, whatever, which I thought was so beautiful. I was wondering who they were and what they did, you know? The stories, the narratives, the beginning and the end of the story,” he says.

Like Brassaï before them, Galliano and his partner Alexis Roche began to stroll the streets of Paris in the moon-bathed dark of night. “We were walking around these areas actually seeing and feeling it… seeing gratuitous reflections of buildings in puddles. Stunning! Alexis took pictures on his iPhone.
And I got more and more into it: questioning who people were; their lives and stories. Were they coming or were they leaving? Inspired by many of Brassaï’s characters, we kind of created our own,” he explains. It birthed the whispered words that opened the cinematic precursor screened immediately before the show: “Would you like to take a walk with me, offline?” While capturing the premise of the collection, the sentiment also reflected Galliano’s sensitivity to consciousness and awareness: being present in the moment, themes that have pervaded the study of the digital age central to his work at Maison Margiela.

Starring Leon Dame—one of Galliano’s thespian muses—the short film portrayed a character on the run through the rainy streets of night-time Paris in a perfectly mysterious overture to the collection. “It was a mystery. What he was running to, or away from?” Galliano says, listing some of the ‘red herrings’ he planted in the film: there was some sort of contraband passed between characters in a paper bag, a tsarina’s jewels, a bloody handprint dripping on the snow, and the flash of a doll sitting in the back of a car. “These were the inspirations for the collection. It finishes with Leon running down the stairs, heart pounding, skin glistening, and undressing at the same time. Then, he enters the show venue, regaining his composure and becoming very couture: that very illustrative line… giving me shape!” Galliano says, describing Dame’s ecru calico corset cinched tightly over an anthracite herringbone wool trouser.

Under the gilded Pont Alexandre III, Galliano had created the Parisian brasserie of Brassaï’s dreams. “The bridge was built to honour Alexandre III, but I loved the idea of doing a show in its underbelly where these characters would hang: like-minded people; a community. The place was home to art squads in the eighties, so I was channelling that.” His research brought him back to Casque d’Or, a real-life femme fatale who roamed the nightlife of Paris at the turn of the century and rose to notoriety because of her love triangle with two of the era’s most infamous gangsters. “The leader of each street gang fell in love with her and she played them off against each other. These were the people that actually hung out under these bridges. We looked at all the court orders and imprisonments during our research. It’s all real,” Galliano says.

Casque d’Or inspired the characters that followed Dame into the brasserie, draped in silk and muslin dresses created with Galliano’s ‘retrograding’ and ‘aquarelling’ techniques. “The ladies of the night! Promenading, coming back from the best dinner or party ever, slightly sore feet. An abandon, if you like, but totally in control of their destiny. They were backlit by the moon that we created,” he says, referring to the constant theme of the collection. “It was the idea that she had been walking along the cobblestone, and maybe there was humidity from the Seine and a light drizzle. She had come from somewhere and was walking home.” Their hair was fuzzy, as if the wind of the river had swept it into a frazzled Belle Époque frisure. “For sure, she had been up to something backstage, having fun,” Galliano smiles. “Or, she’d been awoken very abruptly!”

Was she a friend? A seductive foe? “There’s a part in the precursor where you see pigeons. Someone disturbs them and they all fly away. I start hooking into my horror film genre and the fantasy of vampires and things like that,” he says, suggesting the latter was probably the case. Galliano flicks the page of his pliage, an accordion-style folder used in haute couture where each silhouette of a collection is photographed from the front and, if you turn it around, from the back. He arrives at a young man in a checked beetle-back coat. “A boy chewing on a matchstick,” he reflects. “Today he’d be a skateboarder. Younger in age. Maybe the son of one of the ladies of the night. We don’t know.” Wearing what looks like a classic gentleman’s coat in a coarse fabric, Galliano explains it’s all a mirage—a ‘milletrage’ as he calls it—created by the lightest millefeuille filter of check-printed cotton, double organza, beige cotton and a tulle voilette with a tobacco-stain print.

“It’s a photographic trompe l’oeil inspiration where none of the fabrics that the boys wore were real. The final layer of the garment is printed to evoke the moonlight kind of blanching out creases, lapels and gestural drapes already there in the cut, enhancing and highlighting it. I wanted it to be light as a feather. If it was an ulster coat, it had to feel round and fuzzy. So, there was printed tulle, printed fabric, a fine layer of lint, double-organza… It was like a moment in Brassaï’s picture,” Galliano says, highlighting the body language of the boys. “They’re trying to hide their faces through gestures translated through the cutting. They’re not styled like that, the clothes are actually cut like that. They’re inspired by the character of the man who would have hung out in this brasserie. Maybe he was the boy who put the bets on for the ladies? Shall we call him the runner?”

“Later on, you see some influences of the militaire. You don’t know if they’ve come back or if they’re about to go,” he continues, referring to hourglass-tailored men in lampasse-lined trousers. “Being near water, we of course had sailors that had come up the Seine and disembarked their boats. Long-lost lovers, new acquaintances… ” Scored with Adele’s cover of George Michael’s Fastlove, there was a certain sense of seduction in the air. “Adele very kindly gave us permission to use a special one-off recording for the show from the memorial for George Michael. If you listen to the lyrics and imagine these ladies and boys walking the night, it’s quite perfect,” Galliano says. The Maison couldn’t get the rights from the late singer’s estate for the live stream, so Adele allowed the use of Hometown. “Emotionally, it has such an appeal that really brought you in.”

As the show progressed, the music elevated into emotive Vivaldi, re-arranged by Max Richter. It was around this time that a new character entered the brasserie: a woman dressed in a bottle green satin-back crêpe skirt adorned with a crescent moon motif in metallic fringing, wrapped in an Eau de Nil boiled-wool cardigan. “Ooh, she’s shivering! Cold! Very cold, very cold,” Galliano erupts. The clenched cardigan echoed the look he created for Kim Kardashian for the Met Gala months after, in May: an eighteenth-century silver brocade corset worn over a skirt hand-wired in silver, mirror and crystal formations, wrapped in a pale grey thistle-washed boiled cashmere cardigan, which instantly ignited conspiracy theories on social media. Why would Kardashian wear a cardigan on a red carpet? Was she trying to hide something? While the comment section was burning, Galliano was checking his stock levels. “I was on the phone going, ‘Do we have this in the stores?’ We did the day after!” he laughs. “Kim liked the concept. She thought it was cool and very modern to pair the cardigan with what we had proposed. She got it. We went for a shape that looked as if it could have been her boyfriend’s cardigan she’d picked up after a night of magic but kind of dressed in haste. She was very game.” In the narrative-driven dressmaking of Galliano, Met Gala looks become characters too. In fact, his way of creating silhouettes for his shows isn’t dissimilar to how he would approach dressing a celebrity. “The girls do a lot of walking with me up here in the studio, and how the volume moves when she walks almost directs how you continue to cut and place the dégradé of technique,” he says, pointing to the lace dresses in the January show.

Galliano’s research of body language and gestures got him thinking about dolls: “The idea of dolls that are so loved to death, and the expression of love, the passage of time, worn away, snugged and cuddled. It’s that doll that knows your life, that you confess everything to and involve in everything, who knows all your secrets. That doll, my god, if ever she came back to life and confronted you…” He pauses; composes himself. “I collect them; I love them. I have life-size dolls I used to bring to the studio and dot around my table and out in the stairs. People were really freaked out to the point that the guvernante wouldn’t come up to sort out my office. Alexis said, ‘It’s freaking people out, John. You’ve got to take some of them out.’ I didn’t get it! I love sitting with them, imagining the history. It’s imbued with energy. I’m electrified by dolls.”

Visiting Galliano’s office is like stepping into his imagination. Painted in a deep, mind-altering blue, the space is intoxicatingly scented and adorned with artworks everywhere you look, from the old masters to fashion illustrations and personal photographs. In a corner sits Auntie, a wooden Victorian lay doll who lives in an antique bergère push chair once used to ferry society ladies around the Tuileries. She carries a parasol lined with Penthouse images from the 1970s. Inspired by his research, Auntie became the muse for the collection’s doll-like creations and choreography: Pat McGrath’s glass skin make-up; Pat Bugolawski’s marionette movement direction; and many of the characters themselves, including that of Galliano’s main muse, Thomas Riguelle, who works with him at Maison Margiela and inspires much of his ‘emotional cutting’.

Young Thomas became The Ventriloquist, dressed in a brown tweed ‘rétrécirage’ jacket, ‘milletrage’ trousers with vermillion lampasses, a black leather cincher, an antique silk bow tie, a wood-imitation moulded leather breastplate, a black felt bowler hat and papier mâché, clay, string and tulle gloves inspired by Auntie’s hands. “I hadn’t even thought about the ventriloquist doll but as we were working, Thomas was sitting next to me. He said, ‘There’s no boy dolls. It’s not fair.‘ So, we grabbed some washed wools and a pair of pants and knocked up the look. In that fitting, I swear I saw Auntie starting to tremble. I think she fell in love with Thomas,” Galliano says, coyly. “She was getting very excited as Thomas got into his pose.” Because lay dolls were used by artists to paint the bodies of the patrons they were portraying, the life-size wooden creatures were also known as ‘artists’ muses’. That notion fuelled a painterly theme that soon began to manifest in the collection.

As a dressmaker, Galliano has always cut clothes the same way a painter composes a painting, line by line, filling it with colour and accents until the motif comes to life. It was never more expressed than in this collection’s Kees Van Dongen-inspired silhouettes, characters he refers to as “the muse for all seasons”. This was the ghostly look Sarah Mower had texted me about the morning after the show: a gloved bodysuit ‘aquarelled’ in the style of the fauvist painter, with a lace-encrusted dress layered over it, an abstractly embroidered face mask in tulle, and a foam hat wrapped in stockings. She looked like she’d stretched her way out of a canvas and materialised in the real world. “I thought it would confuse the senses a bit. It looks as if her she’s in the nude and her body is painted, but she’s completely covered. Under the all-in-one is a silicone prothèse. It was an illusion,” Galliano says.

Made of synthetic hair, the merkin she wore underneath – also echoed in other looks—became a sensation. He got the idea while trying to find a solution for what to put under his ultra-delicate transparent lace dresses. “The idea of a G-string… it was like, ‘Guys, we gotta try harder!’ We were really stuck. I think I asked someone to embroider a little tulle but the dress is so fragile that anything you put under there looks so common. So, I thought we’d rejoice in the merkin!” As it turned out, fake pubic hair causes quite the stir. “It ended up being front page news in Spain in a very respectable newspaper, with a whole thing that went on about health issues and how important it is to stop doing Brazilians, and how liberating it was. While I’m doing my detox, I’m hearing about this,” Galliano recalls, referring to the health spa he traditionally visits after finishing a show. “It had a kind of sociological effect. People were discussing it in serious ways.”

Still manoeuvring his pliage, he flicks through a series of “reverse swatching” looks of foam garments wrapped in stocking material. “There’s Madame Bijou,” he says, evoking the famous Brassaï photograph of a woman in a brasserie, gesturing at a particularly voluptuously padded look.
Then, he arrives at the hourglass men’s tailoring, nipped-in coats and distressed dresses, and ‘stripe-tease’ looks that closed the show. “I imagined them as a twisted bourgeois family taking their porcelain dolls out for a walk around the Tuileries, so sharply tailored and carved. I kept playing the music from Oppenheimer as a mood,” Galliano says, mimicking the sound of an explosion.

“Twisted auntie pushing the doll in the perambulator. This one could have been the nanny,” he gestures. “Mum and dad… The English teacher…. Then, there were these gorgeous porcelain dolls, like An American in Paris. The last one had fallen in the Seine. She had the wet look,” he says matter-of-factly, describing the look worn by Gwendoline Christie: an overdress and an underdress in white silk taffeta with ‘retrograding’ in seeping silicone coating worn over a blue-and-white striped cotton poplin corset, with a porcelain-imitation moulded leather breastplate. The family appeared “as our ladies of the night went to sleep during the day,” Galliano says and pauses mischievously. “Two or three in a coffin at once!”

Testament to our current desires, the overwhelming reception to Galliano’s show reflected a thirst for authenticity coupled with haute couture mastery. I ask him why he thinks it had such an impact on audiences from all walks of life. “I’ve heard different things. Some thought it was a bold stance to creativity when perhaps some thought we were lacking it in the industry; an antidote to an algorithm-based culture where creative decisions are made by data, not emotions,” he reflects. “Emotion! There was a full moon, Adele’s lyrics, the muses that go the extra mile for me. It rained at the perfect time, creating that Brassaï puddle. The techniques we challenged ourselves with… we’ve seen a bias cut before, but have we ever seen it on that body shape? We felt alive. We embraced technology, we involved our ‘digital natives’. Communication! And I think a lot of people were longing for a place like that,” Galliano says, referring to the otherworldly brasserie he created under the bridge. “I wish that place could be there. I would be there. I would be Madame Bijou.”