Maison Margiela’s Triumphant Spring Couture Is Getting an Encore
SECOND GLANCE: John Galliano’s spring 2024 Artisanal couture collection for Maison Margiela — nearly universally acclaimed as one for the history books — will get a second viewing during Paris Fashion Week, which is dedicated to fall 2024 ready-to-wear collections.
The fashion house is billing its “special installation” of the collection as a “re-see” opportunity for the happy few who were at the show during Paris Couture Week on Jan. 25 — and a chance for industry professionals who didn’t attend to discover the clothes IRL.
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The invitation-only, by-appointment visits at Maison Margiela’s Paris headquarters are being scheduled between March 1 and 7.
The collection was inspired by the “voyeuristic portraiture of Brassaï,” the French photographer who documented the “underbelly of Paris” and its after-dark revellers, according to the house.
Staged in a painstakingly recreated ramshackle bar set under the Pont Alexandre III in Paris, the show was a theatrical tour de force. There were sheer bias-cut dresses dabbed with scribbles of silvery embroidery, or dense accumulations of godets; rumpled street-urchin suits nipped and tucked for maximum glamour, and gauzy siren gowns that revealed the models’ enhanced Jessica Rabbit figures.
Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner were among the VIP guests who marveled at the extreme corsetry, the refinement and delicacy of the clothes, and the emotive modeling.
Galliano returned haute couture to its original R&D purpose, his collection realized via a litany of new techniques developed over one year, some involving boiling and glueing, others incrustation and complex thread-work.
One technique the house dubbed “emotional cutting,” which entails imbuing garments “with the unconscious gestures that shape our expressions: a caban pulled over the head in the rain, a lapel raised to cover the face, a trouser hoicked up to evade a water puddle.”
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