The Dark Art of Galliano: Fashion as Theatre and Performance
John Galliano was never merely a designer. He was, and still is, an artist whose medium was fabric, and whose canvas stretched not only across the human body but across the entire spectacle of fashion itself. When Galliano entered a room, it wasn’t just an entrance; it was a performance, a theatre where every thread was a line of dialogue, and every silhouette told a story — often one more extravagant than the last. To understand Galliano’s work is to step into the world of spectacle, where the line between art and commerce blurs, and where fashion becomes a theatre that’s as much about the audience as it is about the performer.
Galliano’s runway shows were legendary, but they were not just about showcasing clothes; they were about creating worlds. Whether he was resurrecting the grandeur of Marie Antoinette with her powdery wigs and baroque corsetry or channelling the raw energy of punk through shredded fabrics and chaotic prints, Galliano’s creations were never just clothes — they were the scripts of a performance, the costumes of characters not yet invented.
But behind the theatre, behind the gilded facades of his creations, lies the darker side of Galliano’s artistry — a side that challenges not only our perceptions of fashion but also our understanding of beauty, identity, and excess. In this exploration, I aim to reflect on the complexities of Galliano’s career, evaluating the dual nature of his work as both an aesthetic triumph and a moral conundrum. Fashion, after all, is not just about the clothes we wear, it’s about the stories we tell through them. Galliano was a master storyteller, but perhaps his greatest tale was the one he told about himself.
Christian Dior Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2004 (Source: Jean-Pierre Muller/AFP/Getty Images)
Galliano’s Runway: A Stage for Rebellion
When John Galliano debuted his collections, he didn’t just send models down the runway — he opened a portal into a world of imagination, a world that existed only for the length of the show but felt real enough to be lived in. His shows were grand narratives, carefully crafted performances where each detail was considered. From the moment the first model took her stride, it was clear that this was not just about showcasing fashion; it was about telling a story, making a statement, and captivating an audience with the kind of theatricality that is often reserved for the stage.
Galliano’s designs weren’t just garments, they were characters. They were worlds that spoke to the viewer not in words, but in movement, colour, and texture. He understood fashion as a form of expression that was just as potent as any spoken dialogue. It wasn’t simply about what someone wore—it was about who they became while wearing it. Fashion, for Galliano, was an act of transformation, and the runway was the stage upon which this act unfolded.
For instance, Galliano’s Fall 2000 collection for Christian Dior, where the runway was transformed into a carnival of excess, a celebration of the macabre and the sublime. The collection itself was a blend of the historical and the contemporary, drawing from Victorian mourning dress and the extravagant robes of French aristocracy, yet it was elevated with a modern twist. Models, draped in velvet and lace, walked to the rhythm of a haunting opera score, their movements embodying both the opulence of the past and the rebellious spirit of the present. It was not merely fashion; it was an immersion in a world where beauty, excess, and decadence were paramount — and the boundaries between reality and fantasy were deliberately obscured.
In a way, Galliano’s work could be seen as a direct confrontation with the sterile, minimalist fashion that dominated the 1990s. Where Calvin Klein and Helmut Lang stripped back to the bare essentials, Galliano pulled us into a dreamscape of excess. His clothes were not just about utility or form — they were about drama, about creating a character, about defining identity through the garments we wear. Galliano was a costume designer for the soul. And like all great costume designers, he understood the power of transformation: the ability to step into a different identity, to inhabit a new role, and to perform for an audience who would respond to what they saw. Fashion, for Galliano, wasn’t about dressing the body, it was about constructing a narrative that transcended the body itself.
Dior: The Ultimate Playground
Galliano’s arrival at Dior in 1996 wasn’t merely the entry of a new designer; it was the opening of a door to a world where imagination, opulence, and rebellion would collide in the most theatrical of ways. In many ways, Galliano didn't just join Dior — he redefined it. His early collections were drenched in the whispers of history, where French aristocracy, Victorian mourning rituals, and the decadent 18th-century court dress collided with an energy that refused to be constrained by the past. Galliano understood, perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, that fashion is as much about shaping the present as it is about referencing the past.
The Spring 1997 collection, where Galliano paid homage to the French Revolution, remains one of the defining moments of his tenure at Dior. It wasn’t just a collection, it was a confrontation. Models, swathed in lavish gowns resembling those of Marie Antoinette, traipsed down the runway, their faces blank slates of opulence and fragility. And then came the revolutionaries, the political figures who deposed the queen, draped in the tattered remnants of nobility. The juxtaposition of opulence and upheaval was powerful: beauty and rebellion were not separate forces but inseparable characters in a tragedy where both played essential roles. Galliano’s Dior was not just about the splendour of fashion; it was a commentary on the very nature of power, class, and the inevitable fall of all things.
But it wasn’t just the clothes that made Galliano’s Dior collections revolutionary — it was the entire atmosphere, the immersive experience. Galliano’s shows became a canvas, the runway a stage where the fashion was the script, the models were the actors, and the audience, never passive, was transported into a living, breathing narrative. His Fall 2000 collection, for instance, where the runway transformed into an opera house draped in lace, velvet, and mystery, is an example of how Galliano’s vision wasn’t just of the clothes, but of the world in which they existed. Each collection wasn’t just a new season’s worth of garments; it was an entirely new act in an ongoing performance, a chapter in a story where the boundaries between reality and fantasy were purposefully blurred.
Galliano’s Dior wasn’t about quiet elegance or restrained beauty. It was about excess and excess’s many faces — sometimes baroque, sometimes grotesque, sometimes tragic. It was about rebellion against the sanitized minimalism of the 1990s and bringing back a visceral, almost operatic level of drama. He understood the power of couture—not as a commercial venture, but as a space for the imagination. Fashion ceased to be simply about craftsmanship or the design of a garment; it became about creating worlds, defining identities, and blurring lines between artist, model, and muse. Couture was no longer for the rich — it was for the dreamers, the rebels, the storytellers.
Galliano’s 2004 Spring collection for Dior, often referred to as the ‘Jungle Collection’, is another testament to his genius. The runway was transformed into a lush, surreal jungle where models, draped in feathers and exaggerated silhouettes, appeared as both wild creatures and glamorous heroines. The collection was part savage, part divine — Galliano had taken the rawness of nature and turned it into high fashion, reclaiming primal power for the modern woman. It was an extravagant metaphor for the jungle of society, where beauty often comes at the expense of survival, and where even the most dangerous elements can be dressed in silk and satin.
In each of Galliano's collections at Dior, there was a constant tension between history and the present, between excess and restraint, between the sacred and the profane. His clothes weren’t just designed to be worn; they were designed to be experienced, to be felt. It was a kind of seduction that wasn’t just about the garments — they were a declaration, a performance of sorts, making the wearer and the observer participants in a larger narrative. The clothes were never just about style; they were about story.
Galliano had the unique ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. He took couture, a space once reserved for the rich and the powerful, and imbued it with the vitality of fantasy. Every piece became more than just an outfit: it was a visual cue, a line of dialogue in a play where fashion itself was the plot. His collections were performances where the runway was a stage and every movement an act, leaving the audience not just looking at fashion, but participating in it. Galliano didn’t design clothes; he created a world, and for a few minutes, he invited us all to step inside.
In essence, Galliano didn’t just change Dior; he reshaped how we view fashion itself. His collections weren’t just a showcase of garments — they were a reflection of the internal, of the surreal, of the wild imaginings of an artist who knew no boundaries. Where other designers saw a season, Galliano saw a story that could be told, over and over, on the grandest stage possible. The fashion world became his theatre, and for those fortunate enough to witness it, it was a performance that would never be forgotten.
Dior Haute Couture Spring / Summer 1997 (Source: firstVIEW)
From Dior to Margiela: A New Chapter
John Galliano’s fall from grace in 2011 was not just a scandal — it was an implosion, the kind that reduces a towering myth into fragments scattered across the industry. The maestro of excess, the orchestrator of opulent fantasy, had become a cautionary tale, his dismissal from Dior leaving behind not just an absence, but a ghost that haunted the runways he once ruled. Fashion, a world that thrives on reinvention, was suddenly forced to question its own ability to forgive. Was Galliano an artist who could be salvaged, or was his legacy to be buried beneath the weight of his own undoing?
But fashion, as it turns out, has a short memory and an even shorter attention span for moral absolutism. When Galliano returned in 2014, not in a grand spectacle but through the doors of Maison Margiela, it was an entrance marked by an eerie quiet. No grand pronouncements, no extravagant fanfare — just the slow, cautious steps of a man attempting to stitch himself back together, much like the deconstructed garments that Margiela was famous for.
At first glance, Margiela and Galliano seemed like an unlikely pairing. Margiela was the patron saint of anonymity, a brand built on the art of erasure: white lab coats instead of star designers, tagless garments instead of screaming labels. It was the anti-fashion house, the quiet rebellion against the very kind of grandeur Galliano had spent his career constructing. How does a man who built Versailles on the runway suddenly find himself in a house that thrives on dismantling the very concept of identity?
And yet, if there was ever a place for Galliano to rebuild — not just as a designer, but as a man, it was Margiela. The house’s philosophy had always been about questioning the nature of fashion itself, about peeling away the layers to expose what lies beneath. And wasn’t Galliano, in that moment, in need of exactly that? A place where the theatrics were stripped back, where his work would have to speak louder than his past?
His first collection for Margiela in 2015 was a whisper rather than a shout. The signature Galliano drama was there, but subdued, lurking beneath the surface rather than exploding onto the runway. Deconstruction, that sacred tenet of Margiela, became his tool for self-examination. The clothes were torn apart and reassembled, pieces that felt like relics from a world both familiar and fractured. There was something poetic in that — the man who once built the most extravagant fantasies now working within the language of fragmentation, repurposing the remnants of the past into something new.
But Galliano is not, and never was, a minimalist. Restraint could only last so long. As the seasons passed, his Margiela began to take on its own vocabulary, one that fused the ghostly anonymity of the house with the fever-dream storytelling of its new leader. The Artisanal collections became his new stage, each one an unfolding theatre of transformation. His Autumn/Winter 2019 Artisanal collection, for instance, was a dissection of the uniform, a meditation on authority and the weight of identity. The coats were sculptural, almost militaristic, yet softened by the ghostly transparency of tulle veils — a contradiction between control and vulnerability, power and fragility. It was, in many ways, a reflection of Galliano himself, a designer caught between his past excesses and the weight of his own reformation.
And then, of course, there were the shows that proved Galliano still knew how to create a moment. Leon Dame, stomping down the Spring 2020 runway like a soldier who had wandered into an absurdist fever dream, his gait exaggerated, theatrical, almost grotesque in its defiance of traditional runway poise. It was Galliano’s Margiela in its purest form — disruptive, unsettling, brilliant. It was as if Galliano was reminding the world: I still know how to make you look.
His later Artisanal collections became more abstract, more poetic in their explorations of memory and decay. The Spring 2024 Artisanal collection, for example, felt like an unravelling... literally. Garments were disintegrating on the body, threads hanging loose, textures distorted by layers of transparency. There was something haunting about it, as if the models were walking spectres of fashion’s past, figures dissolving before our eyes. Galliano had always understood the power of transformation, but now he seemed to be exploring the opposite — what it means to decompose, to fade, to let things fall apart.
Margiela was never meant to be another Dior for Galliano. It was not the place for grandeur in the traditional sense. Instead, it became a place where he could experiment with the grotesque, with the transient, with the unfinished. It was a new language, one where opulence was replaced by an eerie kind of beauty, where excess took the form of distortion rather than embellishment.
If Dior was Galliano’s fantasy, Margiela was his reckoning. At Dior, he built worlds; at Margiela, he deconstructed them. And in that process, he too was unmade and remade, his career a continuous act of metamorphosis, proving that even in the ruins of scandal, there is always the possibility of reinvention.
Galliano at His Own Label: Redemption or Reincarnation?
Galliano also returned to the world of personal branding in 2014, with the relaunch of his eponymous label. The collections he showed under his own name were a testament to his creative resilience. Still, they felt like echoes of the grandeur he had once brought to Dior. His return to the runway after his scandal was an exercise in both artistic redemption and the battle for personal reinvention. The collections were stunning — rich in the fantasy and lavishness that had characterised his earlier work, but there was a palpable sense of distance, a dissonance between Galliano’s past and present selves.
What was clear, however, was that Galliano’s love for storytelling remained. His own label provided him with the freedom to experiment, to create without the constraints of a legacy he had to uphold. But even as he sought to reclaim his position in the fashion world, Galliano’s past actions continued to loom over him. His return to fashion wasn’t just a comeback; it was a public struggle for redemption, for forgiveness, and for the chance to prove that the creator of some of fashion’s most iconic collections could still be relevant in an industry that moves at breakneck speed. Whether he succeeded or not is still up for debate. But what is certain is that Galliano’s return to the spotlight didn’t erase the complexity of his journey — both as a designer and as a man.
Galliano as a Mirror: Fashion and Identity
To understand Galliano is to understand that fashion, in his hands, was never just about fabric stitched together to drape a body. It was about becoming. It was about stepping into another world, another identity, another time and place, and believing — if only for the length of a runway — that the transformation was real. His models were not just wearing clothes; they were inhabiting them, swallowed whole by a narrative. A Galliano show was never just a presentation of garments — it was a séance, a conjuring of spirits from history, from fantasy, from the raw depths of human emotion.
To wear Galliano was to step onto a stage, whether one realised it or not. His clothes demanded something from the wearer: a willingness to surrender to character. A bias-cut dress from his early years whispered of the jazz-age libertines who wore silk as a second skin; a Dior couture coat trailed with gold embroidery and lacquered tears could turn its wearer into a tragic heroine of a forgotten empire. His collections weren’t merely inspired by history; they were echoes of it, stitched with the ghosts of fallen aristocrats, war nurses, vagabonds, and goddesses.
Galliano understood better than most that identity is, at its core, a performance. We curate ourselves daily — through clothing, through posture, through the subtle choreography of social interaction. His fashion simply heightened this reality, turning it into theatre. And yet, the question that lingers over his legacy is this: what happens when the man behind the mask stumbles? What happens when the performer steps out of character, and we see something we wish we hadn’t?
His fall from grace was not just about scandal — it was about the collapse of illusion. Galliano, the master of transformation, found himself stripped bare, exposed in the ugliest way possible. There was no lace veil to soften the blow, no bias-cut silk to slip over the moment and reshape it into something beautiful. The world saw him, not as the enigmatic genius behind the curtain, but as a deeply flawed man, drunk and spitting venom in a Parisian bar. And suddenly, the suspension of disbelief was shattered. The spell broke. The audience gasped.
This is the uneasy contradiction that sits at the heart of Galliano’s story: can we separate the art from the artist? Should we? Fashion is built on fantasy, on the idea that we can escape, that we can reinvent, that we can slip into a dress and, in doing so, slip into a new self. But what happens when that fantasy is poisoned?
It is easy, and perhaps comforting, to imagine art as existing beyond the sins of its creator. After all, Galliano’s work remains unchanged — his Dior collections still shimmer with the same brilliance, his Margiela Artisanal pieces still hold the same haunting beauty. The clothes themselves did not commit the crime. And yet, fashion is not a painting that can be admired in a vacuum. It is worn, lived in, absorbed into culture. To wear a Galliano creation is, in some way, to carry a piece of him with you. And that is where the discomfort lies.
And yet...
There is something deeply human in Galliano’s story, a tragic arc as theatrical as any of his runways. If he spent his career playing with the notion of transformation, then perhaps it is only fitting that he himself has been forced to undergo one. His exile from the industry was his reckoning; his return, first in whispers and then in bold steps, has been his attempt at redemption. At Margiela, he no longer drapes women in the grandiose costumes of royalty, but in garments that explore distortion, fragmentation, and rebirth. His work has become rawer, stripped back, sometimes eerie in its melancholy. Perhaps Galliano himself understands what it means to be unmade and remade.
Fashion, after all, has always been about reinvention. About the possibility of shedding one self and stepping into another. Maybe Galliano’s career is its own kind of couture garment — torn apart at the seams, deconstructed, and now, slowly, stitched back together. Whether the final creation will ever be as dazzling as before remains to be seen. But if history has taught us anything, it is that identity, like fashion, is never truly fixed. It shifts, it warps, it rebuilds itself. And sometimes, just sometimes, it finds a way to be reborn.
Galliano's Legacy: A Cautionary Tale and a Testament to the Power of Fashion
John Galliano (Source: AFP )
Galliano’s story is, ultimately, one of contradiction. He is both a visionary and a cautionary tale. His work will undoubtedly be remembered for its artistic brilliance, for its ability to transport audiences into a world of dreams, of fantasy, and of excess. But it will also be remembered for the scandal that shattered the illusion, for the moment when fashion as theatre turned into a real-life tragedy.
Yet, there is a certain irony in Galliano’s legacy. He, more than anyone else, understood the power of reinvention. Fashion, like theatre, is about reinvention, about constructing new identities, about creating a new narrative. Galliano’s own narrative, however, took a darker turn — a reminder that even the most extravagant costumes cannot protect us from the consequences of our actions. And perhaps that is what makes Galliano’s work so fascinating: it is not just about what we see, but about what lies beneath the surface, the darkness that we are often unwilling to confront.
Fashion, like life, is full of contradictions. Galliano’s career was an exploration of these contradictions, of beauty and excess, of fantasy and reality, of creation and destruction. And as much as we might want to reject the darker aspects of his legacy, we cannot ignore the fact that Galliano’s work, for better or for worse, was a mirror to the world. Fashion, as Galliano proved, is not just about clothes — it is about performance, about identity, and about the stories we choose to tell, even when the narrative becomes uncomfortable.
Galliano’s legacy is a whispered incantation in the grand theatre of fashion — his name, like a candlelit spectre, flickers between genius and ruin, never fully extinguished, always haunting the stage.
S xoxo
Written in London, England
30th January 2025