Paris Womenswear A/W 09

John Galliano

Posted 11th March 2009 23:08 BY Alex Fury

An anonymous concrete warehouse, flat straight catwalk and four rows of wooden benches for seating. Could this really be a John Galliano show? As we all know, for extravagance, Catherine the Great has nothing on Galliano - was the master of modern make-believe trying to pull this one off on a budget?

Then the heavens opened and a blizzard erupted, along with an ear-splitting whistle of Romany music - Galliano was scaling the Steppes once more and taking us on a magical mystery voyage into the deepest darkest old country. Gypsy was the theme - and as expected, Galliano created the gypsiest gypsies you've ever seen, colliding national costume culled from Russia, Mongolia, Persia, Peru and just about anywhere inbetween, usually into a single outfit. Maybe the budget was blown on the clothes as certainly the mere cost of the fabric to create them, let alone the workmanship within, would make heads spin. Naturally enough, we opened with Galliano's gallant stab at a winter staple: the wool coat. Galliano's was a veritable Kilimanjaro of felt engulfing the model's body, exploding into gargantuan volume at the hips, sleeves inflated to haunch of venison proportions and the whole thing crusted with a good fifteen pounds of hefty Hungarian peasant embroidery. Not so basic then. With their faces painted like Matryoshka dolls, heads swathed in gypsy headscarves jangling silver coins and teetering on pom-pom encrusted platforms - all the while parading through that infernal squall of snow under a blinding violet spotlight - Galliano's girls were certainly earning their crusts. And truth be told, Galliano was too. These clothes were perfect examples of his febrile imagination working at full pelt, colliding cultures, juxtaposing textures and telescoping history to mind-boggling aesthetic effect. His colour sense was impeccable: working through from the opening outfits in dove-grey, black and palest oyster, colour began to creep in. A black bodice was gored into a loden skirt; a cyclamen coat was scrolled with passementerie patterns part militia, part Andalusian royalty; while cerulean, black and violet clashed gloriously in a single jacket, seams outlined in cerise piping and the whole thing scrawled with Romanian folk-embroidery. Panniered skirts were cropped at mid-thigh, embroidered, appliquéd with ribbons, ruched and pleated into a dazzling display of dressmaking fortitude.

If that all sounds somewhat heavy, it was - those silhouettes bulked out even the slimmest of models, who frankly baulked at hauling the weight of fabric down the mile-or-so of snow-laden runway. By contrast, Galliano's eveningwear was feather-light: paparazzi-pleasing molten chiffon dresses in delicate eighteenth century colours, fiendishly ingenious bias-cutting seductively spiralling around models with palms and bodies crossed with silver like fortune-tellers, and heads topped with fluttering Valencienne lace veils for the most exquisite of gypsy brides.

Undeniably beautiful and creatively dazzling as every piece was, the difficulty was imagining any of these pieces having any relevance whatsoever off the runway. Those final half-dozen bias frocks may have some kind of life on red carpet ingénues, once the swathes of jewellery and towering platforms are stripped away and a lining subtly sewn in. But even then, will anything even approaching their couture level ever make it to the Galliano consumer (whomsoever she may be)? More worrying than the mere runway-to-reality gap - always more of a gaping chasm where Galliano is concerned - was the undeniable sense that these clothes were simply out of tune with the times. Would any woman next season really want to cover herself with gypsy embroidery, even whittled-down to a trim on a neat little jacket? Would a modern woman want to wear pom-poms? Could she ever see herself gussied up as a Bavarian beer-wench in one of Galliano's pleated skirts, part schoolgirl fancy-dress, part Greek Proedriki Froura? The answer is no. Galliano's escapist fantasia is always fabulous. But in this instance, we really needed his clothes to speak a language we could understand.