Galliano’s Excellent Adventures
By ALEXANDRA MARSHALL Published: December 3, 2006
Fashion designers roam the globe in search of ideas all the time. But by hot-air balloon? That archaic mode of transport was how
John Galliano toured the Valley of the Kings in Egypt a few years ago. It was not, incidentally, the first time up and away for Galliano, the controversial 46-year-old creative director of Christian Dior.
“I’m an adventurer and a pirate,” he tells me in his atelier at Dior’s Paris headquarters on Rue François. Galliano’s characteristically unconventional vehicle choice wasn’t just a case of an eccentric artiste leaning on the moneymen to indulge him his latest whim. The slow-moving aerial view of northern Africa set in motion a train of random associations, from the bas-relief postures of the Egyptian pantheon, which led to belle-epoque corsetry, to the poses favored by the photographer Richard Avedon, which became Dior’s spring 2004 couture collection — one of Galliano’s most celebrated to date.
While Galliano’s travels may do double duty as fact-finding missions about the shopping habits of his global customer, his modus operandi is total immersion. “I want to experience firsthand,” Galliano explains. “It’s how I learn, how I get inspired.” Thus, 1,000-thread-count sheets in fashion-friendly boutique hotels are often passed over in favor of traditional tatami sleeping mats or shabby old palaces in remote Indian villages. If you know Galliano’s work, you know he’s not your average designer. He’s not your average tourist either.
This year, Galliano celebrates his 10th anniversary at the design helm of Dior, and he’s turned the fruits of his travels into a limited-edition collection of 12 Dior saddlebags, each representing a particularly rich stop on his global itinerary. In the span of a colorful decade, Galliano’s creations have referenced indigenous Peruvian headgear, Masai chokers, Tibetan topcoats and Tyrolean dirndls — sometimes all in the same outfit. But the new range of bags is somewhat more streamlined, with a simple one-country, one-bag approach: he sings out “HOL-lywood!” when he shows me the white satin one that represents the United States, emblazoned with more rhinestones than any cowboy I ever saw.
Fans of Galliano’s esoteric couture may think he’s taking the easy route by commemorating his decade with bags instead of high-concept high jinks. Leather goods are a cash cow for any luxury fashion house, and the saddlebag, the jewel in Dior’s leather-goods crown since it first appeared in 1999, has done its part: its shape and giant “CD” hardware trickled down from a couture collection dedicated to the English sporting life by way of “The Matrix.” It was shown with bondage boots and fishermen jackets turned into dresses. “It was the first bag I created here at the house of Dior, and she’s still with us,” he says with a glow. He says customers are always asking that Dior give it a spin to go with a particular collection, and he’s obliged. “She’s become a classic,” he says. This year, she’s also become a slide show of Galliano’s every trip.
With Galliano as my guide, we page through his albums, and it becomes clear, as he turns over each laminated leaf, that the adventurous part of his traveling is more about what he does than what he wears. Anyone who’s ever seen Galliano take a bow at the end of a show knows he closes each collection in full thematic costume, whether it’s in pirate gear or a
NASA-approved spacesuit, complete with fishbowl helmet. On the road, he still manages to toss in some color, and he’s as tanned and as buffed as ever, but his look is more Juicy Couture than jaunty buccaneer. Mugging in front of the Taj Mahal, he’s wearing a travel-worn tank top. O.K., there’s a bandanna over his nose and mouth, but he’s not playing railroad robber; the trip happened at the outbreak of SARS. When he danced with Shaolin monks in the Forbidden City, he wore jeans and a turbanesque bonnet. When he climbed atop Ruby, a hand-painted elephant in Amber, India, he let her pink-polished toenails and Technicolor swirls take center stage, opting for what looked like broken-in jeans. And to a tea ceremony in Tokyo, he got away with a sweatshirt and a fedora.
Let’s be fair to Galliano: sometimes he hits one remote village a day on each two- to three-week trip. These are not glamorous jaunts; they are more like overstimulated boot camp. Galliano forces himself (without the aid of Ambien) to get on local time immediately. As to the state of his famous abs, he keeps up his daily hour-and-a-half workout no matter what. Yes, the photographer who joined the designer, his right-hand man and a few design assistants commemorated Galliano’s first stomach-crunching back flip in the hotel gym, and, yes, Galliano had his hair straightened for the occasion. But the Kodak moments are so that nothing is entrusted to mere memory. Obviously the detailed visual record can be transformed quickly into, say, a new textile print, like the Chinese graffiti scratched into a bamboo forest, or a desired direction in runway styling, like the workaday chignon of a rural Chinese woman who tied hers with dishrags. (“As soon as I came back from this trip, I was screaming, ‘Orlando Pita!”’ Galliano says, referring to his hair guru. One can be only grateful that a big book he picked up with a section on “Mullets of Argentina” has not so far enjoyed the same fate.)
To remain as open to these moments as he can, Galliano does no research until he returns. He merely shows up with “as few preconceived notions about a place as possible.” This is not always fun, as when he met his team in New Delhi on the heels of an isolated three-week vacation in Parrot Cay. “It was just a shock,” he says. “I mean, it looked like a lawless society: no traffic lights, and oxen and animals and children and thousands of people, and this kind of suffocating color. I had to go back to the hotel for a bit because it was so overwhelming.” He also relies on local guides, who don’t always get his mandate. Galliano winces at the memory of the dinner-theater show of tango through the ages. But with persistence and patience, he usually finds his transcendence. In Buenos Aires, it came at an underground tango party held in an abandoned abattoir. (“The roof had collapsed, and the moon was shining through, and there were all these cats running around,” he recalls breathlessly. “Major. I’d arrived.”) Still, we are ultimately talking about making clothes, and even during
Unesco-style exchanges, fashion is not left in the dust.
“A whole family of Tibetans,” he recalls, “came down from the mountains in coats wrapped in that Tibetan way with a red scarf. Gorgeous. Immediately I locked eyes with a really young guy. I couldn’t speak the language, and he couldn’t speak English, but he started to take his coat off, and I started to take my Levi’s jacket off” — and they swapped. “When I turned the sleeve back, I could see that he had embroidered his whole diary on the inside. Obviously he didn’t have any money for paper. I still have that jacket at home.” Unfortunately, it will not be reproduced for sale around the world anytime soon.
The bags, on the other hand, will be in Dior boutiques around the world. While there may be more than a hint of “It’s a Small World” to Galliano’s anniversary accessory collection, it’s quite clear that, for him, there’s nothing small about it at all.
