As if this year was already not hard enough with the never-ending changes within the main chairs at the most notable houses, the final blow, and perhaps the one that hurts the most, came yesterday during these festive times in the form of a three-part Instagram post that appeared in our feeds and that, when reading the username, confirmed the arrival of a moment we were fearing would come. After ten years, that for sure felt longer due to how prolific and fertile they were, the master John Galliano says goodbye to the house that saw him change the course of fashion for a decade; a house whose existence changed the course of fashion itself. Maison Margiela spends his first hours leaderless, but differently than with other exits, we know for a fact this was a sweet goodbye, one where the two parts involved leave each other at their best.
"For I am 14 years old today—14 years sober." That's how the letter starts, and to that we say congratulations, John. This healing journey of probably one of the last legendary couturiers had the luck to be intertwined and enriched by the creativity poured into breathing a new life into a house deeply loved, deeply respected, and deeply fundamental to fashion history. If all brands are attached to a specific aesthetic, style, or codes that make the task of finding who is the right person to lead them pretty difficult, Maison Margiela is all this but multiplied by a hundred. Staying as a house in charge of an internal team after Martin Margiela’s departure from his own creation, it was difficult to imagine who could carry the weight of such a legacy on their backs, and when on October 6 of 2014 John Galliano was announced by the OTB group as the new creative director, it was difficult to imagine a better choice than him.
Even if it was a wonderful idea for us from an external point of view, Galliano himself faced doubts about his suitability for such a position in a house so deeply admired by him throughout his life. It may be mind-blowing for us to think how a man with his immense talent, who had already reshaped the industry as we knew it, could ever feel he was not the right one, but Renzo Rosso, the fairy godmother of this tale, was committed to this merge—between one of the key houses of his company and a creative so dear to him—to happen. It took a cup of tea between him, Galliano, and Martin—dream tea rotation, if you will—and the following words coming from Margiela’s mouth: “Take what you will from the DNA of the House, protect yourself, and make it your own... you know how to," for John to know he was ready for the job.
The rest is history, and this is said not just as an idiom; what the last ten years of Galliano at the helm of Margiela have signified for the fashion industry is invaluable, and such raw, innate, and overflowing almost mediaeval type of artistry, by contrast with our current world and generation, where sadly we are not used to such grandiosity, becomes even greater. Following Martin’s advice, adjusting the tools, the archives, the technologies, and the world to his way of doing, rather than the opposite, has resulted in a ten-year legacy that, dare I say, is impossible to surpass. This legacy found its climax in the artisanal collection from earlier this year, an event so perfect, a collection so sublime that it felt too good to be true, and it was in fact true, but it’s also now attached forever to the sad fact of being the last one from John in the house.
In true icon fashion, Galliano ends with this, one of his multiple magnum opuses, a decade that has healed not only himself and his relationship with the act of creating but that has also healed the hearts of thousands of fashion enthusiasts who, through his work, have discovered a newfound passion for the craft that we thought was lost in the past. We preserve the hope as we await an announcement of his new venture as we gaze at the empty chair at Margiela, wondering who could ever fill such a void.