Galliano and the Runway

Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, modernity, and deathliness. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003.

p.11
-in the late 20th c. fashion looped back to earlier moments of modernity in specific formations, not because the moments of past and present were the same but because a visual link between them uncovered interesting things about the present that echoed the past.
-Fashion designers can elucidate these connections visually in a way that historians cannot do without falsifying history
-For designers, it is because through the liberties they can take that contemporary meaning can be constructed
-Historical references and examples, not a history of past of present but rather a method
-The method is a kind of historical scavenging

p.67

John Galliano
First couture collection for Givenchy January 1996
-20 feet up in the air, on top of an over-scaled pile of mattresses, two models in vaguely 18th c. dresses and wigs preened and coquetted in a Princess and the Pea scenario

First couture show for Dior January 1997
-Staged in a fake maison de couture: in the Grand Hotel in Paris, created a scaled-up facsimile of the original Dior showroom, including the famous staircase on which Cocteau and Dietrich had sat in the 1950s to watch Dior’s presentations

-Subsequent shows stages in suburban sports stadium transformed into a forest scene with 40 foot high spruce trees

-The Paris Opera converted into an English garden where fashion photographers were given straw hats on entry

-The Carousel du Louvre, the official venue for the Paris collections, made over as a Manhattan rooftop scene, complete with battered chimney stacks, designed by Jean-Luc Ardouin

In every case, his transformation of the space involved effacing its real characteristics in the interests of imposing his own fantasy vision on the space, weaving instant mythologies and creating something out of nothing.