John Galliano: Modernity and SpectacleTo his mixes of cultures and history were added a significantly different
ingredient, the image and inspiration of real historical figures. He was drawn
in particular to Edwardian actresses, demi-mondaines and women of
independent means, all of whom were identifiable by their striking, outré or
‘exotic’ appearances. Flamboyant women of wealth such as Nancy Cunard
and the Marchesa Casati rubbed shoulders in his collections with bohemians
like Misia Sert, the artists’ model and sexual libertine Kiki de Montparnasse,
the actress and demi-mondaine Gaby Deslys, and the great courtesan Liane
de Pougy. These real women were mingled with images from art and cinema:
society women from the paintings of Boldoni, Sargent and Tissot, cinema
actresses like Claudette Colbert, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Marlene
Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor, and, from Britain, the aristocratic women
photographed by Madame Yevonde in the 1930s. These moneyed images
were mixed with references from popular culture of the past: pearly kings
and queens, Hells Angels, migrant southern Italian circus folk from the 1930s.
Then there were couture influences, from Madeline Vionnet’s bias-cut tea
gowns of the teens and 1920s and the Dior archive from the 1940s and 1950s.
These too were intercut with imagery of tattooed Samoan women, Asian
jewellery, African beading and native American patterned blankets, or woven
with ‘Europeanised’ images of the orient, in figures like Suzie Wong and
Madame Butterfly. Galliano’s historical and cultural promiscuity can be
tracked in his diaries, or sketchbooks of his collections, kept by Amanda
Harlech, his right-hand woman from 1984 until his move to Dior as principal
designer in 1996, and in his sketchbooks from 1997 onwards, some of which
are reproduced in Colin McDowell’s book Galliano.^5 So acute and wide-
ranging is Galliano’s eye for the visual detail of the past, and so inventive
the way he juxtaposes histories, styles and cultures, that it is hard to imagine
a Galliano design which is not a visual quotation from a pre-existent source.
What is unique, however, is the way he kaleidoscopically fuses a range of
references into a single figure.
In keeping with the spectacular quality of his designs, his fashion presenta-
tions were highly theatrical during the 1990s, both in his own name and as
principal designer for Givenchy and then Dior. Although the spectacle was
conceived on a grander scale in the late 1990s, all Galliano’s shows had been
characterized by highly developed sense of theatre. In 1984, his graduate
collection from St Martin’s in London, ‘Les Incroyables’, was heavily
influenced by a contemporary production of Danton at the National Theatre
in London where Galliano worked as a dresser while a final-year student.
- Ibid. McDowell reproduces several interesting pages from Galliano’s sketchbooks which
show the breadth of his eclecticism.