The Bizarre Fantasy of John Galliano Returning to Dior
The internet forgets that when he was there, his success was mixed.
This week, the fashion internet alighted with excitement over a report from Miss Tweed that John Galliano might end up back at Dior. Such intel has circulated previously, but was met this time with acute enthusiasm, the sort that leads to someone entering their Brat era.
While it has been confirmed that Galliano won’t renew his contract at Margiela, it’s unclear what he’s actually doing next. Yet the response to the Dior idea was odd. It reminded me of when public figures die and are instantly lionized, their transgressions glossed over or forgotten. Fashion followers have been doing that for months with Galliano, who was fired from Dior after his multiple antisemitic tirades became public. But also, people forget (or maybe don’t know) that he wasn’t regarded nearly this favorably when he was actually working for Dior.
As I previously wrote, I do not think it would be some great win for fashion or humanity for Galliano to end up back there. But even if you were willing to set aside his personal history, it’s worth remembering that he wasn’t praised as a designer the way he is today when he was in the Dior job from late 1996 to early 2011 anyway.
Veteran fashion critic Cathy Horyn summed up Galliano at Dior thusly in the New York Times in her July 2007 couture review: “Not every collection is great, but each is a reflection of an artistic mind, and that is what we have witnessed in the last decade.”
The man is, of course, talented, and I can understand a craving for this artistry in a time when the luxury industry has exploded and blanketed the world with overpriced garbage, and simple merch has come to pass for high design. But looking back at the reviews, Galliano comes across like a designer who really struggled to balance his artistic ambition with commercial viability.
Galliano was sometimes criticized for being tone deaf, as when he presented a collection inspired by homeless people he saw along the Seine in early 2000. And critics noted frequently that his collections, which often quite literally appropriated other cultures, were tremendously unwearable. His spring 2004 couture Egyptian collection for Dior, including a pink metal pharaoh headpiece, was regarded as among the finest of Galliano’s over-the-top showcases. Yet while critics threw around adjectives like “jaw-dropping” and “astonishing” in reviews, Women’s Wear Daily noted that “this collection offered little news, and ultimately left one wide-eyed but not quite breathless with wonder. Although Galliano seems not to believe it, sometimes less — even a tiny bit — really is more.”
By 2007, Dior parent company LVMH told Galliano to put more wearable clothes on the runway. “We need suits,” then-chief executive Sydney Toledano told the New York Times. Reviewing the collection, Horyn wrote:
Still, it seems sad and strange that 10 years of audacious design at Dior has come down to a gray suit whose homely fit betrays a purposeful lack of attention to detail. No one knows better than Mr. Galliano that the design of these clothes was not up to the standards of a Paris fashion house. But also, no one knows better than Mr. Galliano what it's like to work in a modern fashion bureaucracy, with stores that must be fed.
After this show, Miles Socha wrote in Women’s Wear Daily that “some in the fashion industry had been underwhelmed by parts of Galliano’s output of late… Galliano’s spring 2007 rtw line for Dior, a parade of beige suits with Christina Aguilera’s ‘Back to Basics’ on the soundtrack, drew lackluster reviews, with one critic suggesting the show seemed like the work of another designer. In recent years, Galliano often drew knives whether he unleashed a wild spectacle or reined in his theatricality to show wearable clothes.”
And I get it — critics find things to criticize. But still, you could safely argue that his tenure at Dior was not the second coming of luxury and fashion and all that is holy in Bernard Arnault’s tangled web of excess.
But I’d love to hear from the Back Row community. Please weigh in on where you think Galliano, who is 63, ought to land (if anywhere) next. Also, how do you view his Dior legacy?
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I think people are more nostalgic for the time period when Galliano was at Dior more than anything else. We are missing the theatre and spectacle of a good fashion show, which was proven by the mad love for Galliano’s most recent show for Margiela.
Girl. That Spring 2007 show was the moment when I was like hmmm does JG really know how to make things people want to buy?! He’s always all over the place. It’s too Les Mis. He is of a time a place. But it probably isn’t the Dior of 2024. I doubt he could manage the merchandising of it all the way MGC produces product every season. That was never his thing. Lovely runways, but it does not translate at retail.