## The White Coat

The White Coat

John Galliano stands in the atelier on rue Saint-Maur, adjusting the sleeve of a coat that appears to be disintegrating. The fabric is intact. The construction is not. He pulls a seam, watches the shoulder collapse inward, then resets it with two pins. The coat now sits differently. It also sits correctly.

This is the work. It has been the work since he arrived at Maison Margiela in 2014, a decade after his exit from Dior and the public unravelling that followed. The white lab coat he wears in the studio is standard issue for the atelier. It is also, in his case, something closer to penance.

The Formation

Galliano trained at Central Saint Martins in the early eighties, a period when the school still required students to draft patterns by hand and construct toiles without supervision. His 1984 graduate collection, Les Incroyables, referenced French Revolution dress and sold entirely to the London boutique Browns. It was historicist, technically rigorous, and wildly impractical for anyone not attending a costume ball. It also announced the method he would carry for the next forty years: research, then reconstruct.

At Givenchy and later Dior, that method produced some of the most technically ambitious couture of the nineties. The 1997 Dior collection inspired by the Masai, the 2000 hobo couture show, the endless parade of bias-cut gowns that required fittings measured in hours—all of it was rooted in the same process. Find the reference, break it down, rebuild it as something a body could wear. Sometimes barely.

The work was never minimalist. It was maximal in research, in detail, in the sheer volume of fabric required to make a single dress move the way he wanted it to move. When he was fired from Dior in 2011, the industry spent several years asking what he would do next. The assumption was another house, another couture atelier, another historical rabbit hole rendered in duchesse satin.

The assumption was wrong.

The Pivot

Maison Margiela is not a house built for spectacle. It was founded in 1988 by Martin Margiela, a designer who refused interviews, never took a bow, and showed collections in abandoned metro stations and derelict playgrounds. The aesthetic was deconstruction—not as metaphor, but as literal practice. Seams were exposed. Linings became exteriors. A jacket was a jacket with its guts on display.

When Galliano was appointed creative director in October 2014, the response was scepticism. This was a man who had built a career on romantic excess being asked to work within a system that prized anonymity and conceptual restraint. The first collection, shown in January 2015, did not resolve the contradiction. It leaned into it.

The silhouettes were Margiela: deconstructed trenches, inside-out tailoring, garments that appeared to be mid-transformation. The execution was Galliano: fittings so precise that a coat could be worn four different ways depending on how the wearer pulled the shoulder, colours that shifted from bone to rust to deep navy within a single look, fabrics that had been distressed, over-dyed, and reconstructed before they reached the body. It was deconstruction, but it was also couture-level craft applied to the idea of falling apart.

The tension has remained. Every collection since has walked the line between Margiela's conceptual rigour and Galliano's technical indulgence. The Artisanal collections—Margiela's equivalent of couture—have become the clearest expression of this. A coat is built, then taken apart, then rebuilt with the seams exposed and the lining functioning as the shell. A dress is constructed from vintage scarves, each one hand-stitched and positioned so the print flows across the body as if it were always meant to be a garment. The work is painstaking. It is also, in its own way, invisible. The viewer sees the concept. The atelier sees the hours.

The Signature

What Galliano has brought to Margiela is not a reversal of the house codes. It is a deepening. The Tabi boot, Margiela's split-toe signature since 1988, has been rendered in python, in patent leather, in a thigh-high silhouette that required a new last and three rounds of fittings to ensure the boot held its shape above the knee. The result is still a Tabi. It is also something Martin Margiela never made.

The same applies to the tailoring. Margiela's original deconstructed blazers were conceptual exercises: a jacket with the shoulder pad removed, the lining exposed, the armhole dropped to suggest the garment was in the process of being unmade. Galliano has taken that language and applied the technical precision of a Savile Row cutter. The shoulder is still dropped. The lining is still exposed. But the jacket now fits in a way that allows the wearer to move through a room without the garment shifting out of place. It is deconstruction that functions.

The shows themselves have remained faithful to Margiela's original anti-spectacle stance, at least in spirit. There are no grand staircases, no orchestral scores, no models emerging from fog machines. But there is theatre. The January 2023 Artisanal show featured models walking through a set designed to look like a snow-covered street, their faces obscured by oversized hoods and veils. The clothes were referencing everything from eighteenth-century court dress to twentieth-century workwear, each piece reconstructed from vintage fabrics and shown in a palette of white, cream, and ivory. It was quiet. It was also the most technically complex collection Galliano has produced at the house.

The Next Chapter

Galliano will turn sixty-four this year. He has now spent a decade at Margiela, longer than Martin Margiela himself remained at the house after its acquisition by Diesel in 2002. The question of what comes next is less urgent than it was in 2014, but it has not disappeared.

The Artisanal collections continue to push further into the space between concept and craft. The most recent show, in January 2025, featured garments constructed entirely from repurposed materials: a coat made from deconstructed military blankets, a dress built from overlapping layers of vintage lace, each piece requiring weeks of hand-stitching to achieve a silhouette that appeared effortless. The work is not getting simpler.

Neither is the designer. In interviews—rare, carefully managed—Galliano speaks about the atelier as a place of learning, about the process of working within constraints as a form of creative freedom. He does not speak about legacy. He speaks about seams.

The white coat remains. So does the work. A sleeve is adjusted, a shoulder is reset, a garment that appeared to be falling apart is revealed to be holding together in ways that are not immediately visible. This is the signature now. Not the spectacle, but the structure underneath.