In a brand new, antiseptically clean, state-of-the-art office block in central London, John Galliano - the former Christian Dior creative director - presented his debut haute couture collection for Maison Margiela to an audience of just 100 people.
Read into the choice of venue what you will. A blank slate? A fresh start? There was, tellingly, a white backdrop, much in the Margiela tradition - a house whose label is famously left blank.
Everything but everything in this fashion show would always be searched eagerly for meaning. Galliano was, of course, dismissed from both Dior and his own label in 2011, following a drunken rant in a Paris bar. He entered personal rehabilitation days after the event, flying to the Meadows facility in Arizona, but his professional rehabilitation has been a far longer process. Four years, to be precise.
Add to them the fact Galliano chose to leapfrog the entire haute couture season, and the channel, to show his collection on the final day of London's autumn/winter menswear showcase. No other member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, the governing body of the French fashion industry, has ever done that.
It resulted in Margiela being struck off the calendar of the official couture week, staged at the end of January. This event, appropriately, was a true one-off.
That's the point of couture, where garments are only crafted by hand entirely to order, for specific clientele. It's labour-intensive and heinously expensive. For example, the wedding dress Galliano's Dior created in 2005 for Melania Trump, bride of Donald, cost 130,000 pounds. Margiela's line, although shown under the couture parapluie, is dubbed "artisanal", emphasising the importance of the craftsmen behind its construction.
John Galliano, as a designer, is ingenious. His return to London enforced that point. The capital was the scene of Galliano's early triumphs: his swaggeringly-confident BA graduation collection, for instance, titled Les Incroyables and inspired by French aristocratic rebels. That landed him the window of Browns boutique aged just 23, with coats crafted from tattered curtain brocade made on domestic sewing machines. It was madcap, unwearable, but exploding with ideas.
His first outing for Maison Margiela captured some of that exuberant energy and sense of experimentation. Delicate tulle dresses and swaggering coats were torn apart and reconfigured - so a pair of tuxedo trousers flipped upside-down into a strapless dress, or a shredded coat skewed from the waist into a ballgown. Flotsam - shells, scraps of haberdashery, toy cars and soldiers, none of it especially fashionable - were bricolaged together, Arcimboldo-style, to form faces. Galliano referred to them as a cabinet de curisots.
Perhaps they were also a wry side-swipe at a house known for being unknown (the founding designer, Martin Margiela, never showed his face to press), from a designer known for taking his bows dressed as anything from Napoleon to Neil Armstrong. He restrained himself chez Margiela to a barely-there wave in the house's signature white coat.
I met with Galliano a few months ago. The conversation was decidedly off the record, but he did talk about delving into the house's archives and unearthing the beating heart of the label. It was reflected here, on the record, where Galliano referred to "returning to one's roots". Meaning both his own, and Margiela's. The label's leitmotif is the undone - the unfinished, the work in progress, the partially-realised. Deconstruction was the tagline when Margiela first began showing his clothes in Paris in the late 1980s.
Galliano is a revolutionary too. As a finale to this show, he paraded not the same outfits again, as convention decrees, but the toiles - the "works in progress" rendered in cotton calico. They showed the process of trial, error and experiment that resulted in each garment. They're the blueprints, rarely if ever seen outside of the couture workrooms.
Which underscores exactly what John Galliano is good at: showing us something we have never seen before. Regardless of the name on the label - or, in this case, absent from it - that is what his talent will always stand for.
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