If You Missed John Galliano’s ‘São Schlumberger’ Show, This Paris Exhibition Is for You
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While still a teenager growing up in northern England in the ’90s, Alexander Fury would save up and buy fashions by John Galliano.
He hasn’t stopped, crediting the “fantasy of Galliano’s work” for making him want to work in fashion in the first place — and also driving him to amass a collection already numbering nearly 200 pieces by the British design maverick.
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The crème de la crème of that collecting spree is to go on display on Tuesday during Paris Couture Week in an exhibition hosted by French luxury resale site Re-See at its private salon. Included among the almost 40 items are a number of styles from Galliano’s landmark fall 1994 show, done on a shoestring and paraded in the empty 17th-century Paris mansion of art and fashion patron São Schlumberger.
“I’m lucky that I have about nine outfits from that show. What I love about those is the inherent invention born of necessity — the same color, the same fabrics, reused and repurposed, the jackets proposed upside-down to transform the silhouettes,” Fury said. “There’s a simplicity to their complexity, which I think is a mark of true genius.”
Currently menswear critic at The Financial Times newspaper, and fashion features editor at Another Magazine, Fury is also planning to part with a select number of pieces on Re-see.com as he “hones down” his stash to the “fundamental Galliano collections that really shaped me.”
Among them is a version of the houndstooth suit wasp-waisted Canadian model Yasmeen Ghauri rocked in Galliano’s spring 1995 show, and a few bias-cut dresses, one with an intarsia flower. “I like the idea that I can give these dresses another life,” he said.
This is the second time Re-See has called on Fury and spotlighted his fashion archive.
According to Re-See cofounders Sofia Bernardin and Sabrina Marshall, such exhibitions are targeted at fashion-forward clients who wish to deepen their knowledge of fashion history and design.
“We have seen a huge increase in interest around Galliano pieces,” Marshall said. “The ’90s and logo-mania craze of recent years definitely ushered in a new, younger generation of collectors, while at the same time reawakening the magic of Galliano’s work to generations who lived through these legendary moments.”
While the volume of transactions is small compared to competitors like Vestiaire Collective or The RealReal, Re-See’s average basket is higher than the industry average: it rose to just under 1,500 euros in the first half of 2023.
Fury had mixed feelings about steep inflation around vintage Galliano.
“It’s incredible and exciting to see the record prices for pieces at auctions — albeit slightly frustrating as someone who is attempting to buy these pieces,” he allowed. “To say the secondary market for Galliano through vintage dealers is frenzied is a massive understatement, although I do find it a touch distasteful when you see certain unscrupulous dealers snapping up Galliano on platforms like Vestiaire and The RealReal and then selling it on other platforms for 10 times [that] — sometimes even more.”
The Re-See exhibition focuses on Galliano collections from 1992 to 2002, a fashion decade attracting enormous interest from designers and consumers alike.
“When you look at talents like Galliano or [Lee Alexander] McQueen, their work in the 1990s was all about creative expression, without commerce being considered,” Fury mused. “Today, a young designer is rarely afforded that freedom.”
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