When I heard that John Galliano would be making his comeback, I thought my day was made. Then I saw it would be with Zara. And suddenly I found myself getting a little nauseous.
John Galliano is one of the last designers alive whose clothes brought with them a delirium, that could transport you somewhere else. His Dior shows completely rewrote what a runway could be. In the decade he spent at Maison Margiela, he infused its collections with theatrical innovations and a gender-fluid sensibility while bringing its Artisanal line to new heights. It was a second act so good, it almost eclipsed the first. His Spring 2024 Artisanal show stopped the industry in its tracks, bringing a doll-like beauty with a Pat McGrath porcelain cherry on top. When he left Margiela, it could’ve been easy to assume that the next chapter would be a revisit of Dior, maybe Chanel. Either way, it would be something with the square footage his talent and track record deserve, right?
But after all that, we find ourselves at Zara. Galliano will be working directly with garments from Zara’s past seasons, deconstructing and reconfiguring them into new seasonal expressions rather than designing new things. It’s not a greatest-hits collab in the vein of H&M x Balmain, but a reworking of existing fast-fashion pieces through the couture process. From my perspective, this ‘re-authoring’ could either be the most interesting idea in fashion right now or a very elegant way to describe something really uncomfortable.
My nausea started to give way to something more complicated the more I thought about it. The luxury market has spent the last decade pricing itself into irrelevance for anyone under thirty without a trust fund or the right connections. Galliano nostalgia has been at an all time high: his bias cut slip dresses are at auction, his Margiela Tabi is all over social media and has shown staying power over the last few years, and his name continues to carry the full weight of what people mean when they say they miss when fashion had magic to it. That’s what people are craving, and it’s actually palpable. If anyone can bring genuine craft and intentionality to a mass market context, it just might be the man who spent a decade making Margiela feel transcendent on a fraction of the LVMH budget.
Galliano himself seems genuinely excited, because “it’s not something I’ve done before, so that kind of tickles me- the newness, the excitement, the actual process,” he told Vogue during Paris Fashion Week. That doesn’t seem like the language of someone who had a truckload full of cash backed up to their apartment and couldn’t say no. He clearly has a vision, and we’ll just have to wait and see if it translates.
The first collection drops in September and will serve as a test of how far a designer’s authorship can carry within a system built for mass production, volume, and quick trend turnover, and whether those things can meaningfully coexist. I don’t personally know that they can—it’s entirely possible that the Galliano touch on a Zara dress is the equivalent of trying to hear a symphony through a bad phone speaker. The genius might still be there, but the container we’re seeing it through just can’t hold it.
But I can’t advocate for snobbery either. Maybe this girl who can’t afford Margiela can feel the way a Galliano piece makes you feel earlier than she anticipated.