“The creative process will be the creative process,” said John Galliano during Vogue’s inaugural Global Conversations series earlier this spring. For a couturier as furiously passionate about his work as Galliano, life away from the atelier couldn’t put a stop his productivity. Here, exclusively for Vogue, Galliano reveals two sumptuous couture-grade dresses made by his hands at his home.
“Aspirational beauty, that’s what you hanker after when you’re in confinement,” Galliano says. “I was hungry for beauty, I was hungry to express myself. This feeling that through aspiration, beauty, there could be hope—and a vigor that I've not felt for some time, this power within me that nothing would stand in the way of the creative process.”
Inspired by Vogue’s September issue theme of hope and hopefulness, one dress, featured in the print issue of the magazine, is composed of three layers: a fine jersey base, a heat-fused thermocollant to emulate wetness, and a thin exterior layer of tulle with sleeves. On top, a chiffon mask comes with floral adornments from Galliano’s garden. Another, seen exclusively in footage here, is a tightly woven, light weight, off-white taffeta shirtdress with a billowing cape.
The overall impression of the pieces, which the maison categorizes as a mix of “hope, heroism, and hedonism,” is in line with Galliano’s fall 2020 Artisanal collection for Maison Margiela, which premiered via a transfixing 51-minute film by Nick Knight earlier this summer.
In total, the looks took over 670 hours to produce, though their vision of beauty is, in a word, timeless.
