Maison Margiela Artisanal. Spring 2024 Couture. Paris
John Galliano is the great storyteller of the fashion world, who has danced on that perilous edge of stardom in defining himself a the master Couturier, even though he did fall from grace. Losing out to Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group after he was sacked from Dior in 2011 and unable to claim back his Galliano namesake, which the LVMH owns over 90%. Galliano's debut with Maison Margiela in 2015, re-established himself as the couture genius.
A clever story teller can rework timelines, within its parallel worlds. Beyond any postmodern prose, which can often lead into deeper obscurity. It is the weave, the essence, which holds a conceptual idea together. And what might seem indifferent and foreign, actual holds familiarity and acceptance that it be the imagination as a guiding light. And what an imagination Galliano has, worked into a contemporary twist of historic overtures.
Galliano has maintained his dedicated presence for Maison Margiela Artisanal, redefining its Couture arrays, despite it not under his own name, his latest Spring 2024 collection is very much a Galliano showpiece. Shown on the nether side of Alexandre III bridge in Paris, in a reflection of 1920s hedonism and the Avant-garde, which swept Europe after WW1. Creating a charnelle cafés beneath the famous Parisian bridge, in homage to the Rive Gauche of yesteryear and all the restless spirits the have passed through, and if beaconed to return, they will do reluctantly; to haunt an already tumultuous world. And this is where, like Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent, who has been poking at the 1970s and 1980s hedonistic past, in some ways, showing very little respect to the many that have been lost, who had danced on the edge of oblivion. And never returned.
If we are observers of history, we must show respect to those times by gently putting the past to rest. So, the suffering of the bygone can be released. But, more so in the West, we tend to want to relive and eviograte the phantoms as a spectacle, set against, in a arrogant disposition, our newfound technological wonders of a society that, in all reality, even as a sophisticated benchmark, has actually fallen apart. Have we learnt from the turmoil of history? And in this context, an ultimate question has to be asked. Are we afraid of the new?
That despite COVID-19, a pandemic that did indeed reshape our society, in a hyperreal induced frenzy, we wanted everything back to normal. Instead, it all went backwards, failing to learn from what nature, without consciously being aware of our presence, taught humanity a valuable lesson. To be humble within our fragility. Instead we have Two major conflicts, a genocide in Gaza by Israel, ultra conservative Hard Right governments being voted into power throughout the world. Global climate in disarray, and economic minded Technocrats, who believe that statistically everything can be managed. As inflation is now embedded into everyday living, given rise to plethora of cashless millionaires, and wayward hopefuls who are the new poor.
So, when viewing Galliano's latest spectacle for Maison Margiela, even though it portrays the appeal of a fetish hedonism as a past inspired counterculture, although currently it doesn't exist in any renewed form. Galliano's Spring 2024 Couture collection is an indulgent exhibition, in its simulacrum of decadence. It feels empty and uninspiring.
I will leave this review with a poem from the French Avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who returned from WW1 with shrapnel embedded into his skull, in constant pain he became one of Europe's most famed poets of the 1900s. He died in 1918 from Spanish Flu.
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(A.Glass 2024)
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