Artist Uniform: 50 Shades of John Galliano

In Artist Uniform, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas traces how personal style shapes an artist’s identity.

The phrase “lightning rod” feels like an understatement when describing John Galliano. Even before his career imploded over multiple antisemitic, racist tirades that came at the peak of his era as creative director for Dior, the fashion designer had courted controversy countless times. You don’t get to the top without burning a few bridges. But Galliano took a particular glee in riling people, even as he thrilled them.

So, when the news broke that Galliano’s fashion legacy would be the focus of the 2027 Met Gala and its corresponding exhibit, it was met with a mix of excitement and outrage. After 15 years of penance — plus the very powerful influence of close friend and Met Gala maven Anna Wintour, who spearheaded the campaign to nab him the honor — he has become one of just three living designers to be the focus of a Met Costume Institute exhibition. 

With the exhibition and Gala more than half a year away, the renewed spotlight on Galliano warrants looking back on the man who has indelibly shaped fashion and the culture around it. But understanding the arc of his tumultuous career doesn’t require a degree in fashion history. You don’t need to study each look from the countless collections he designed at his namesake brand, or for Dior and Maison Margiela.

You simply need to look at the man himself. And photos ain’t hard to come by.

Few designers have cultivated an image as eccentric as Galliano’s. Even as his Dior era gave us one theatrically over-the-top collection after another, his post-show runway bows borderline stole the show. Each season, he’d appear after the final model left the stage, not in the usually understated designer uniform but in elaborate costumes that mirrored the season’s themes. He was his own fashion Barbie, donning everything from space suits and bullfighter regalia to Egyptian pharaohs and pajamas with pigtails.

The performative, boundary-pushing personality translated into collections that were technically masterful and critically lauded. A combination of revolutionary body-hugging, bias-cut tailoring, couture-level craftsmanship, and deeply researched reference points cemented him as a fashion industry icon by the aughts. 

Galliano’s own style off the runway was just as noteworthy. As he dashed around backstage at shows or in his ateliers (or, often, at parties late into the night), Galliano filtered through everything from Dali-esque mustaches and dreadlocks to piratey broad-brimmed hats and dramatic, knee-high leather boots. 

This flair for drama runs deep. Galliano’s childhood was deeply shaped by his Spanish flamenco-dancing mother, who dressed him in immaculately pressed and starched outfits, even for trips to the corner shop. An early talent for drawing and sewing led him to Central Saint Martins, where the overlap between the clothes he dreamt up and the outfits he wore himself began to bleed through — a sprouting of what the world would come to see during his Dior era. 

The sketches that would become his breakout 1984 “Les Incroyables” graduate collection were drawn on parchment paper by candlelight. “I tend to become whatever it is I am working on, and I was drawing pictures of the French Revolution,” he told The Guardian in 2003. “I was looking like this down-and-out French tramp. Living it, breathing it.” All the while, he was balancing schoolwork with a job dressing actors at the National Theatre — a position that “helped shape [his] view of drama, of clothing, of costume. The way people dress,” he explained to The New Yorker in 2003. 

It was this androgynous, theatrical style, blending historical pastiche with high fashion, that matched Galliano’s own style and the larger cultural moment of New Romanticism in late-80s London. As a self-proclaimed “club demon” of Soho, he stalked through venues like Blitz and Taboo with the likes of Boy George in the same kind of outfits that he’d found early success with in his graduate show. 

Even as he jumped from England to Paris, club culture remained a constant source of inspiration. He once told culture journalist Dana Thomas in the mid-90s that going to these venues was “where my inspiration comes from. Being alive. Sometimes I’m sketching until five o’clock in the morning, sometimes I’m dancing until five in the morning. It’s all a part of what I do.” 

It was his talent for translating culture into couture-level fashion that won him creative director gigs at the likes of Givenchy and, soon after, Dior. But it was also his unfiltered theatricality and addictive drinking — accelerated by the impossible pace of fashion production at Dior — that became his downfall. The controversy around him has been well and deservedly documented. As high as Galliano’s highs may have been, his lows were incredibly low.

In the wake of his firing at Dior, the Galliano who once used loud clothes as a way to be seen instead used them to hide away. His decade as creative director of Maison Margiela from 2014 to 2024 was marked by a uniform of stark, utilitarian white seamstress coats worn over simple suits and trousers. The swashbuckling pirate of the past had died; in its place, a more muted, decidedly sober Galliano. 

But as we saw during his final Spring/Summer 2024 Artisanal Haute Couture show at Margiela, the same jolt of energy that Galliano brought to his early Dior shows was still there. In a letter about leaving Margiela, he explained that “I had mourned the loss of JG and my previous identity, but I am much happier with the new version of JG.”

What new-new version comes next? Signs are pointing towards the return of, at the very least, a more public-facing chapter for the designer; one that hews closer to the Gallianic excess of his clothes. His High & Low – John Galliano documentary in 2023 and the announcement of a two-year partnership with Zara this year, the most mass-market brand he’s ever touched, signal that he’s done shying away. 

While his image rehabilitation may not win over everyone, it does feel apt that the resurrection of one of fashion’s biggest dreamers comes at a point when the industry itself is shifting from quiet luxury to the kind of creative maximalism that Galliano himself helped to architect.   

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