Mutiny And The Bounty

With his first fragrance for Maison Margiela, John Galliano continues to revolutionize how we see—and smell—this most radical of houses.

- Hamish Bowles

On a June day chez Maison Margiela in Paris’s edgy Eleventh Arrondissement, John Galliano is in the midst of fittings for his first Artisanal men’s collection for the house. The women’s Artisanal collection, based on the idea of “the memory of a garment in another garment,” is in its preliminary toile stages, but in Galliano’s world there is now a powerful crossfertilization of ideas between the two. The Artisanal collections, he says, represent “the raw, undiluted essence, the parfum of the house, which both informs and inspires the eau de toilette.” Fragrance, not just as an analogy, is very much on Galliano’s mind this afternoon: After three years of development, he’s about to unveil Mutiny, his genderless first signature parfum for the house—another indicator, like the expansion into menswear, of Galliano’s ever-growing role since he was appointed Maison Margiela’s creative director in 2014.

In lieu of showing men’s ready-to-wear this fall 2018 season, Galliano has elected to showcase these more couture-like pieces. “I got really excited by the changing landscape of menswear design,” he says, “but I thought, What are you going to do to even get a look in? You are going to play to your strengths.” He revived, for instance, the bias-cut suit from his self-titled fall 1994 collection, which, he said, combined “the erotic sensuality of the kimono with the fluidity of the bias.” Those suits were worn at the time by the high-stepping supermodel Shalom Harlow, and versions were subsequently snapped up by stylemakers including Lee Radziwill and São Schlumberger. At Maison Margiela in 2018, Galliano is showing them on snake-hipped boys with piercings, tattoos, and lashings of attitude. “It’s great that such a feminine way of dressing is so relevant, so right for today,” he says.