The exquisitely lacquered Dita Von Teese, wearing John Galliano s twenties camisole slipdress of beaded nude satin, blithely declared that she had been carried across the snow to protect her swan s down mules so that she could take her place in the front row. She was the perfect almost real-life embodiment of the otherworldly silver-screen sirens whom the designer evoked in his fall show.
Martin Scorsese s The Aviator, with its playfully sophisticated costumes by Oscar-winning Sandy Powell, is fast proving the fashion world s inspirational movie of the season. This lavishly told tale of glamour, obsession, and megalomania was channeled by Galliano s Hollywood back-lot set—complete with arc lights, shadowy scene shifters, and canvas director s chairs (their backs stamped "JOHN GALLIANO STUDIO") drawn up to stars well-lit makeup tables.
Galliano s collection reprised many of his own Oscar-worthy hits, and added some new obsessions—like the Warholian screen prints of over-made-up eyes that fluttered on the back of gleaming white blazers and cabans. With their finger-waved hair, bee-stung glossy black Clara Bow lips, and arched brows, the girls evoked a celebrated ad campaign shot by Javier Vallhonrat in the designer s wildly inventive late-eighties London days. And their clothes brought back further glory moments in his career. Slouchy blazers and wide-leg pants, complete with suede golfing shoes, suggested Dietrich s mannish off-duty wardrobe, now worn with a modern hip-hop attitude. Galliano rang the changes on his signature thirties-inspired bias-cut dresses via appliqués of drifts of butterflies or prints of overscale, Warhol-look carnations; his pretty twenties debutante dresses, meanwhile, were updated with powder-pink marabou or Wiener Werkstätte-inspired trim. Even more playfully self-referential was a giant parka in chinoiserie-embroidered poison-green satin—an obvious allusion to Nicole Kidman s defining 1997 Dior Academy Awards dress, its hood edged in the pale mink that trimmed the hem of that gown.
This greatest-hits collection, while not leading us into a brave new fashion world, at least confirmed the myriad reasons that make Galliano great—not least the preternatural sense of self that saw him take his bow amid a lavishly choreographed explosion of flaming tapers and the whoosh of a wind machine. Vive le roi!
