States of WONDER

John Galliano's recent Maison Margiela triumph was an haute couture tour de force. Yet, as Hamish Bowles recalls, it's but the latest in the designer's long history of era-defining shows.

- Hamish Bowles

It was a sad, rain-tossed evening seemingly lit by candlelight and stars. When the cab arrived at John Galliano’s Maison Margiela show in January at the Pont Alexandre III—the last of the couture for that week—hundreds of kids were waiting and screaming for their own stars. I made my way through the crowds before realizing that I would then have to navigate a series of rain-sodden steps to arrive to the Seine-side building hidden away beneath that magnificent Beaux Arts bridge. I had a stroke a little over a year ago, and I am not as confident with such steps as I once was, but I braved them bit by tentative bit—I had to—and clung on to the handrail for dear life. The archways of the riverside pont had been cleverly trompe l’oeiled with a subtle 1930s look, revealing a battered and forlorn nightclub with some tables and chairs set outside (during the rainstorm they were protected from the pitter-pat hailing down beyond the bridge).

Inside was a seedy ’30s club supported by robust arches of stone, with run-down floorboards leading to arrangements of billiard tables and Thonet chairs. The Galliano gang—at my gathering of tables sat Lila Grace Moss, Tish Weinstock, and the ravishing ballerina Francesca Hayward (I’d just seen her as a heartbreaking Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House)— had dressed the part in barely-there vestiges of lace and chiffon or sweeping trench coats. And we waited. And waited. I think an hour had gone by before Francesca, as punctual as any ballet star, wondered: Was it always like this?