Is 2024 The Year Of John Galliano?

Never mind the rumours that the Met Museum’s Costume Institute had originally intended for this year’s blockbuster exhibition to be a John Galliano retrospective – at Monday’s Met Gala the stage belonged to him regardless.

Galliano might not have posed with a posse of famous fans on the Met’s iconic stairs (he was snapped inside the event) but, wow, did the auteur make his presence felt. It was he who dressed arguably the two most anticipated guests of the night: Zendaya (back from a five-year hiatus and on co-chair duty, riding high post Challengers tourdrobe) and Kim Kardashian (unimpeachable as ever in her enthusiastic dedication to a look; her shrugged on boiled cashmere cardigan perhaps more surprising than the super-snatched waist). That both of them wore Maison Margiela Artisanal, the haute couture line of the house he has helmed since 2014, told you all you needed to know: this was Galliano’s night.

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Also in the Margiela gang? Another co-chair, Bad Bunny, in a navy barathea wool smoking jacket meticulously tailored over a corset. Gwendoline Christie in a sensational liquid velvet bias-cut gown and silk tulle opera cape. Couture connoisseur Natasha Poonawalla in a sculptural white dress with distressed chiffon outer layer. Ariana Grande, who performed for the mega-watt crowd in an explosive white crinoline, shed to reveal a wispy watercolour tulle dress (and hand-painted Tabis) by ‘the one and only, most brilliant angel of all @jgalliano (how i wept in our fitting !!!!)’ as she gushed on Instagram.

Not sated by one fix of Galliano, nor one entrance, Zendaya took to the stairs for a second time in a black taffeta spring 1996 gown from his debut Givenchy couture collection – sourced, and bought, at LA’s ultra-high-end vintage dealer Lily et Cie (the same boutique that provided Jennifer Aniston’s 1999 Galliano Dior dress for the 2020 SAG Awards). And since we’re talking vintage Galliano, another exquisite moment from this year that deserves a shout out is Jennifer Lawrence’s empire line floral Givenchy couture at the Vanity Fair Oscars party, an event to which Kendall Jenner wore Maison Margiela Artisanal.

It's a long way from Galliano’s nadir in 2011, when the then creative director of Christian Dior was filmed spewing hateful, anti-Semitic and racist abuse in a drunken rant at a Paris bar. Many predicted it was the professional end of a talent that burned hot and bright; he promptly lost the Dior gig and headed for rehab.

But although Galliano’s plummet from the highest echelons of the fashion industry was fast, there has been a slow, steady, stealthy ascent back. Not that fashion ever really turned away from him entirely; Kate Moss commissioned him to make her wedding dress shortly after his Dior ousting, and Galliano Dior has been embraced by a whole new generation of fashion fans. He has very much still been ‘on the list’ to the most insidery events, if (one assumes, by mutual understanding) not hanging about the step-and-repeat boards. So, the Met marks perhaps not the climax in Galliano’s unofficial comeback tour – that, surely, would be a reappointment at one of the mega houses; not more important or interesting than Margiela, but bigger in scale and mass-culture clout – rather a swelling towards it.

Other signifiers? High & Low: John Galliano, a fashion documentary released this spring and helmed by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. A candid look at his fall from grace and rehabilitation, it features contributions from friends and admirers including Anna Wintour, Naomi Campbell, Edward Enninful, and Galliano’s former boss, ex-Dior CEO and current LVMH CEO, Sidney Toledano. To many it read like more groundwork laying, before he might – fashion whispers have it – land a major LVMH gig.

Then, there was the ravishing Margiela SS24 couture show, unveiled this January in the shadows of the Pont Alexandre III bridge in Paris. Perverse, poetic, electrifyingly exciting it showed Galliano operating at the top of his creative game. The Cut’s Cathy Horyn wrote it ‘belong[ed] with the greatest Galliano collections’ leaving the week’s other shows ‘however beautiful and well executed, in its dust’; for The New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman it was ‘world-building’ and ‘a riposte to the whole idea of comfort clothing, stealth wealth and playing it safe’.

Certainly Galliano’s risk-taking is invigorating. Fashion has missed him; fashion needs him. Talent is redemption’s biggest ally. But is the industry now ready to risk a fully-fledged Galliano rehabilitation? Is the world? Given the febrile socio-political atmosphere – Columbia University’s protests taking place just the other side Central Park from the Met Gala – the contrition deserves to be examined.

Whether you see Galliano’s reanointing as a fashion king – still dandyish and flamboyant, if a little bruised and burnished at the edges – as wishful thinking or indicative of dubious morality on the part of the fashion world is all about perspective. Firstly, your perspective on the very existence of cancel culture and the arbitrariness of it (who decides who gets another shot? Some people are axed from favour after one misstep; others get an inexhaustible reserve of second chances). And then, too, of whether one can separate art and artist. Look elsewhere in the Met – where works by Picasso (misogynist!), Gauguin (teenaged brides!) and Caravaggio (actually killed a man!) hang – and you’ll see a compelling argument for.

Does Galliano deserve to be referred to alongside those titans of art history? Regardless of their thoughts on him personally, many in fashion would argue yes – his is a generation-defining talent. He makes more compelling a case than anyone that fashion can be art. If the Met marks a pivotal moment in his return to the upper, inner circles – it would be hard to think of a better playground for him. Fittingly, the evening’s dress code – The Garden of Time – was lifted from a J.G. Ballard short story. Galliano is a masterful storyteller, one of the best.

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