## The fitting room at Maison Margiela smells faintly of sizing and steam

The fitting room at Maison Margiela smells faintly of sizing and steam

John Galliano stands beside a tailor's dummy draped in what will become a coat. The garment is inside-out, seams exposed, construction visible. He adjusts the shoulder, pulls the armhole forward half an inch, steps back. The coat will be turned right-side-out later, but for now the skeleton shows. This is how Margiela has always worked—structure first, surface second. Galliano has spent the last decade learning that grammar.

He arrived at the maison in 2014, a year after his exit from Dior. The appointment surprised nearly everyone. Galliano had built a career on theatre: bias gowns that pooled on runways, references pulled from everywhere at once, shows that felt like fever dreams. Margiela, by contrast, had spent two decades dismantling fashion's vanities. The house showed collections on anonymous models, sometimes in abandoned Metro stations. Garments were often deconstructed, sometimes literally split down the middle and reassembled. The founder had left in 2009. The atelier remained.

Galliano did not arrive with a manifesto. He arrived quietly, worked through the archive, and began his first collection without a single interview. When it debuted in January 2015, he did not take a bow. The clothes spoke in Margiela's language—trompe-l'oeil knits that mimicked tailoring, coats with exaggerated proportions, that same inside-out construction—but the silhouettes carried a new tension. Galliano had not erased himself. He had learned to whisper.

Formation runs deeper than training

Galliano studied at Central Saint Martins in the early eighties, when the school still occupied a building in Holborn and pattern-cutting was taught with ruthless precision. His graduate collection, inspired by the French Revolution, landed him a commission from Browns before he left the building. He launched his own label in 1984, showed in Paris by the early nineties, and was appointed to Givenchy in 1995. Dior followed a year later.

The Dior years were operatic. Galliano staged shows in grand salons, sent models down runways in corsetry that referenced the Belle Époque, the Raj, Weimar Berlin. He worked fast, produced two haute couture collections and two ready-to-wear lines annually, and rarely repeated a theme. The clothes were extraordinary. They were also, occasionally, exhausting. By 2011, the machinery had collapsed.

What followed was three years largely out of view. Galliano worked with a therapist, spent time in Switzerland, and eventually began consulting quietly for Oscar de la Renta in New York. De la Renta, then in his eighties, offered him a studio and no press. The two men worked together for several months. De la Renta later told WWD that Galliano needed to design again, that the work itself was restorative. When Margiela called in 2014, Galliano was ready for a different kind of stage.

The Margiela codes are not flexible, but they are deep

The house was founded in 1988 by Martin Margiela and Jenny Meirens. Margiela had trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, worked as an assistant to Jean Paul Gaultier, and left to start something that felt like an argument. Early collections featured garments made from army surplus, tailoring constructed from vintage scarves, shoes with separated toes. The runway shows were staged in unconventional venues—a children's playground, a disused garage—and the models were often cast from the street. Margiela himself refused to be photographed. The clothes carried no visible branding, only a blank white label stitched with four loose threads.

When Margiela departed in 2009, the house continued under a series of design teams. The atelier remained intact, the codes legible, but the collections felt iterative. Galliano's arrival changed the centre of gravity. He kept the blank label, the four stitches, the refusal to take a bow. But he brought a different kind of ambition.

His first haute couture collection for Margiela, shown in July 2015, opened with a model in a deconstructed trench coat, the panels separated and suspended from the shoulders by fine wires. It was pure Margiela in concept—deconstruction as method—but the execution carried a lushness the house had not shown in years. Galliano followed with ready-to-wear collections that played with proportion and trompe-l'oeil, knits that mimicked denim, dresses that appeared to be collaged from other garments. The work was cerebral, but it was also seductive.

Signature emerges through repetition, not revelation

Galliano's Margiela has developed a recognisable vocabulary over the past decade. The Tabi boot, originally designed by Martin Margiela in 1988, has been reworked in dozens of iterations—stiletto heels, platform soles, knee-high versions in patent leather. The Glam Slam bag, introduced in 2018, takes its quilted structure from the house's quilted leather jackets and translates it into a soft, pillowy silhouette. Both pieces have become commercial anchors without losing their strangeness.

The haute couture collections remain the most radical. Galliano has shown garments constructed entirely from broken porcelain dolls, coats made from deconstructed furniture, dresses that appear to be wearing their own garment bags. These are not wearable in any practical sense, but they are coherent. They extend Margiela's original thesis—fashion as a system that can be dismantled and reassembled—while adding a layer of craft that feels almost devotional.

The ready-to-wear collections are quieter but no less considered. Galliano has developed a house silhouette that balances volume and line: oversized blazers with nipped waists, trousers that pool at the ankle, coats with exaggerated shoulders that taper sharply through the body. The palette is often neutral—black, white, grey, camel—with occasional injections of red or cobalt. The clothes are designed to be worn, not just photographed.

What follows is less clear than what came before

Galliano turned sixty-three last year. He has been at Margiela for a decade, longer than the founder himself. The house is now owned by OTB, the Italian conglomerate that also controls Diesel and Jil Sander. Revenue has grown steadily under Galliano's tenure, driven largely by accessories and the Tabi boot's unlikely ubiquity. The runway collections continue to generate press, but the business rests on quieter foundations.

Galliano has not announced plans to leave. He has, however, begun to speak more openly about the work. In a rare interview with System magazine in 2022, he described the Margiela atelier as a place where he could "disappear into the process." He spoke about the pleasure of working within constraints, of finding freedom inside a set of rules he did not write. The comments felt less like reflection and more like commitment.

The next chapter, if there is one, will likely look like this: more refinement, deeper exploration of the house codes, continued tension between the theatrical and the austere. Galliano has spent ten years learning to speak in someone else's voice. The surprise is how much of his own remains audible beneath it.