Hamish Bowles remembers Galliano's earliest student shows—and celebrates his recent couture masterwork.
Director: Talia Collis
Directors of Photography: Rachel Batashvili, Etienne Baussan
Editor: Evan Allan
Producers: Qieara Lesesne, Gigi Chavarria, Amaury Delcambre
Associate Producer: Lea Donenberg
AC: Pauline Gefin
Gaffers: Julia Gowesky, Adam Pelle
Sound: Nicole Maupin, Hubert Rey Grange
Production Assistant: Erica Palmieri
Production Coordinator: Ava Kashar
Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Senior Director, Production Management: Jessica Schier
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Entertainment Director: Sergio Kletnoy
Associate Talent Manager: Phoebe Feinberg
Director, Content Production: Rahel Gebreyes
Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson
VP, Digital Video English: Thespena Guatieri
Images & Footage Maison Margiela
Director: Talia Collis
Directors of Photography: Rachel Batashvili, Etienne Baussan
Editor: Evan Allan
Producers: Qieara Lesesne, Gigi Chavarria, Amaury Delcambre
Associate Producer: Lea Donenberg
AC: Pauline Gefin
Gaffers: Julia Gowesky, Adam Pelle
Sound: Nicole Maupin, Hubert Rey Grange
Production Assistant: Erica Palmieri
Production Coordinator: Ava Kashar
Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Senior Director, Production Management: Jessica Schier
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Entertainment Director: Sergio Kletnoy
Associate Talent Manager: Phoebe Feinberg
Director, Content Production: Rahel Gebreyes
Senior Director, Programming: Linda Gittleson
VP, Digital Video English: Thespena Guatieri
Images & Footage Maison Margiela
Category
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PeopleTranscript
00:00 I did not expect the response.
00:02 It was so great to see the whole world become obsessed.
00:07 No, I've never experienced a show that goes viral.
00:10 That's the first time, I think.
00:26 The first time I met John Galliano,
00:31 I saw him across the room.
00:33 I thought, "I can't allow this moment to pass."
00:38 It was one of those nights I was leaving a club with Kate.
00:41 All fine, all fine, and then this gwendoline came out
00:45 from the bowels of the club.
00:47 I remember Alexi was with us and I was like, "Outside, outside!"
00:50 and jumped in the car and disappeared.
00:53 But never forgot that image.
00:54 John's work has been hugely influential to me
00:58 since I was a teenager.
01:00 And John was extraordinarily kind
01:04 and said that he hoped that we would work together one day.
01:07 I've been a fan of Gwendoline's for a long, long time.
01:10 She didn't know.
01:12 And I think in one of those banters we were having, I said,
01:14 "You know we've met before?"
01:16 And she went completely red.
01:18 She went, "Oh, I thought you would never...
01:20 You'd forgotten that."
01:22 It was quite sweet.
01:23 This is the first time I've walked in one of John Galliano's shows.
01:27 Even saying that feels so bizarre.
01:31 She put the time in. She came in for the fittings three or four times.
01:33 Trips to London, through vêtements, the undergarments, the corset training,
01:38 and created the dress on her, really.
01:42 It's really influenced me
01:45 more greatly than perhaps I can even convey.
01:48 Wild imagination, but coupled with
01:51 real craftsmanship.
01:53 Those things coming together and creating true artistry.
01:57 Well, my research books, I love the way they're all
02:09 pinned up like little butterflies.
02:12 You can help yourself. You can flick through and see there's
02:15 research on dolls, Van Dongen as well.
02:18 Some of the makeup ideas that we played with.
02:22 And the colours.
02:23 Over here, it's like a cabinet of curiosity.
02:27 So we have the Juliet corset, the Eiffel corset, the cincher.
02:32 And these are for boys and girls.
02:34 I'm happy to discuss some of the newness, if you like,
02:40 or some of the new techniques.
02:41 Retrograding.
02:43 The idea that you could almost treat
02:47 the subject wearing the dress like a line drawing.
02:50 So imagine you start with just a crayon at the top.
02:53 And that crayon becomes more intense as you get to the waist.
02:57 Then through colour and fabric and a retrograde of techniques,
03:01 you build up the three-dimensionality of that dress.
03:05 It's like degradé.
03:06 So degradé of line, degradé of technique, degradé of textures.
03:11 When I saw the collection, I saw quite how beautiful it was.
03:16 The innovation with the fabrics, the narrative, the storytelling, the emotion.
03:22 When I saw all of those things,
03:25 it connected back to what his work has brought me.
03:29 At that level of dressmaking, which is the highest form of dressmaking,
03:34 just once a year, because of the time it involves.
03:39 The structures, the sub-structures, the engineering,
03:42 especially building a dress on a redefined body shape.
03:46 That's what I wanted to do. It was inspired by many references.
03:49 I looked at the Brassai photographs. That's what he talked about.
03:53 And I knew those photographs very well,
03:54 because I'd been quite obsessed with them when I was around 20.
03:57 I used to stare at those photographs and think about who the people were
04:00 and what the stories were, what had been happening.
04:02 Once we had redefined the body shape,
04:05 it was only then that I could start to build the dress.
04:07 So it always had to come back to that waist measurement, corset,
04:12 otherwise the dress wouldn't fit.
04:15 [The Brassai Collection]
04:19 I'd already started to work with curvier girls on couture private orders.
04:25 I wanted to do that more, so I embraced it.
04:29 I absolutely embraced it. The casting was all-inclusive.
04:32 I thought the casting was spectacular.
04:34 I thought it was really great,
04:36 because we saw so many different types of people.
04:39 What was incredibly modern about the show
04:41 was that it was exploring a totally different silhouette
04:45 from one we're used to seeing.
04:46 The different morphology, it was just so exciting and so challenging.
04:51 Everything was, you know, you had to find an answer, you had to work it out.
04:54 I am extremely tall and I'm certainly not sample size.
04:58 And I thought it was beautifully radical
05:01 for John to amplify and intensify my size
05:07 and my proportions and change them.
05:09 And really be extreme about what I am and who I am.
05:15 [Pat McGrath]
05:18 Well, Pat McGrath is also a genius.
05:21 I know that can be an overused phrase,
05:23 but it's used rightfully so with Pat.
05:27 We became friends because she found me in a nightclub years ago,
05:31 and I was wearing a look of hers.
05:34 And she said, "I love your makeup. I want to take a photograph of you."
05:37 At that time, I didn't know what Pat McGrath looked like,
05:39 so just this woman had taken a photograph of me.
05:41 We talked about makeup and afterwards someone said, "That was Pat McGrath."
05:44 And I went, "No!"
05:46 I really missed out on a huge moment.
05:50 [Pat McGrath]
05:57 Well, I remember it was early January and I had my briefing.
06:02 And then John just told me this amazing story.
06:04 You know, we were going to be under a bridge.
06:06 She showed me the lighting and then also showed me all of these incredible characters.
06:12 It was such incredible detail.
06:15 And then John showed me this porcelain doll.
06:18 And he was like, "I'd love to take it to Glass Skin."
06:21 So instantly I knew we were going to have to find something completely new and different.
06:29 I knew we were going to have to take it there.
06:31 We'd been working on something that we call Margella's Skin for a long time now.
06:36 One of the inspirations was the China doll.
06:39 So it's something we've gradually been working towards.
06:43 But here was the opportunity to really go for it.
06:46 So I said, "Let's go for it."
06:49 Once you're told you have to do a new skin that has never existed before,
06:53 you know you have to develop something that is out of this world.
06:57 We started with the look.
06:59 The look was kind of more matte.
07:00 We kept trying to add more shine, but it just, to me,
07:04 it looked like something we'd already seen before.
07:06 It was all about the designs, the weight.
07:08 How do you make skin look like porcelain?
07:11 It was really measured in how the makeup is applied and the lightness.
07:17 And like we said, we couldn't do anything that was clown white.
07:20 It had to be very subtle.
07:22 That took a lot of working out just from a point of view of timing.
07:25 So I think to begin, there were seven layers, seven layers.
07:30 And the effect was just like, "Wow!"
07:32 You know, when the girls, the boys and girls walked in,
07:34 we were just like blown over.
07:36 We went into the Margiela offices,
07:39 and then we showed the first look with the new gloss skin,
07:43 and everybody was a standing ovation, but the whole team.
07:46 To come into this Margiela show
07:49 and see that she had pushed the boundaries even further.
07:54 She had taken the idea of a filter, which is obviously AI and digital.
07:59 She'd taken something from the digital realm
08:01 and brought it into the physical realm.
08:04 This is something entirely new.
08:06 Very soon I realised that, you know, with the undergarments that we were using
08:17 and the corsetry and the hair and the makeup,
08:21 that we actually needed a military style planning
08:24 to get all my muses ready on time.
08:26 So I said, "Can you cut off some of the time, Pat?
08:28 Can you bring it down? Can you bring it down?"
08:29 So she went back to do it with her team.
08:32 And they got it down, and then they got it down again.
08:34 In the end, I will say, with the team and myself,
08:37 they had it down to around half an hour.
08:39 We had to be quick. We cannot be late.
08:42 Really and truly, I would say that the look would take about an hour and a half.
08:45 I think when I started, I'd already planned it out upstairs where we normally show,
08:53 and then it suddenly dawned on us that we'd run out of space to do it indoors.
08:58 I actually discovered that place on one of my early morning jogs,
09:01 then inquired if it was possible to do something there.
09:05 And I was told no, and then got a no again.
09:09 And then the more I couldn't get it, the more I wanted it.
09:11 You know how it is, because I just love the address.
09:13 The idea that we'd invite our guests to this fantastic address
09:17 and then take them downstairs, this dank kind of underbelly under the bridge,
09:24 with the sound of the river, the ebb and the flow.
09:27 And that muffled sound of cars and people above the bridge.
09:31 And it was like the audio that I needed for my characters.
09:37 Something in my work as an actress is that when I go on set,
09:41 I want to be in a world and I'll do whatever I can to create that world.
09:46 And often I'll need to use my imagination to its fullest, to really immerse in that world.
09:53 But with what John had created, I didn't have to so much do that work.
09:58 Oh, it'd be fab to actually have them look like they're coming back from a night out or whatever.
10:05 There was a bit of a vampire story underneath all that too.
10:08 They had to get back before midnight.
10:09 I did not expect the response to be as big as it was at all.
10:21 I did not think there would be this tsunami of absolute love.
10:27 It was so great to see the whole world become obsessed, trying to make this glass skin.
10:35 And it was, like I said, it was heartwarming.
10:38 It was beautiful to see. And at the same time, I was shocked.
10:43 The reaction after, I mean, normally I just, you know, I grab my dogs and I'm out and in the car.
10:49 But I was informed that something had gone down.
10:53 The kids that were dressing up with pillows and dad's coats and doing the Leon walk.
10:59 And as a designer, you want to inspire the young ones and the young kids.
11:03 You know, it's amazing to get reviews, but to actually, you know, leave one of these venues,
11:11 go home and you see a kid has switched his raincoat back to front, charging down the street.
11:17 You think, yeah, I've done something here.
11:19 That makes me really happy.
11:20 But you know what was amazing was that a few of my friends said,
11:25 Gwen, imagine all those kids being inspired by Galliano show like we were growing up.
11:35 And the impact that that had on us. Imagine it happening again.
11:44 That's how shows used to be, you know.
11:46 You go and you get inspired to do it yourself with whatever you had with you.
11:49 It would just inspire you.
11:50 So I think that's a good nerve to hit, I think.
11:54 I'm a fan of fashion. I love fashion.
11:58 As a child, that was my day out was to go to department stores, look at collections with my mother.
12:03 And for me to actually live this and see the things I see,
12:08 I bring that inspiration and my passion into all of my work.
12:12 And also to see how everyone works together as teams, everybody.
12:18 It's incredible. It's beyond dreams.
12:22 [Music]