by Brenda Polan
Further reading: Dolce & Gabbana published books to mark both their tenth and twentieth anniversaries. The latter, 20 Years Dolce & Gabbana (2005), includes a well-written text by Sarah Mower that exhaustively documents their collections.
43 JOHN GALLIANO (1960-)
British designer John Galliano is arguably the greatest of a steady stream of talents who have emerged from London’s Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design since the 1980s. He was the first British designer of the modern era to head a Parisian haute couture house. He has consistently taken fashion shows to new heights of theatricality, most notably for the house of Christian Dior, where his shows are of unequalled extravagance, displaying fantastical imagination. Galliano brought back romance to fashion in 1997 when he became chief designer at Christian Dior, fifty years on from the launch of Dior’s New Look.
To his critics, his clothes can veer close to costume, bearing little relation to the modern-day world (and often with no connection to the showroom range sold to buyers). But the fashion show is, for him, a theatre, where the imagination should roam. His meticulously themed collections, often inspired by complex fictional tales with a heroine at the centre, have unashamedly pursued flights of fancy. Over the years, he has produced many complex, difficult-to-wear, unforgiving clothes that have delighted fashion editors although less so store buyers and customers. But, thanks to his romantic spirit and personal charm, he has ridden a surf of goodwill—and in the process created some of the most beautiful clothes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His willingness to experiment has inspired a generation of young designers. Even as a college student, he had an obsessive curiosity, a desire to push ideas to their limits. Early in his career, for example, he devised his own form of cutting in the round so that sleeves followed the shapes of the arm and jackets turned into curvy sculptures. Invariably he cuts fabric on the bias, so that it clings to the body. ‘It’s a sensuous way of cutting, very fast and fluid, with a great respect for women’s bodies,’ he told Roger Tredre in 1990. ‘It’s like oily water running through your fingers.’
Juan Carlos Antonio Galliano was born in Gibraltar in 1960 to a Spanish mother and Gibraltarian father, moving to London as a child. He joined Saint Martins before its merger with Central when it was still known as St Martin’s School of Art. Among the lecturers was the fashion writer Colin McDowell, who later became his biographer. Galliano researched his collections intensively, spending hours in the library of the Victoria & Albert Museum building up a meticulous picture of an imaginary heroine who would be the true muse of each collection. Multilayered stories were created that fed directly into the design process. The theatricality of Galliano’s approach to fashion might be traced to his student days: he worked as a dresser at London’s National Theatre and frequented a nightclub called Taboo where his friends included Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant Australian costume designer and living artwork, and Stephen Jones, the milliner and a long-term collaborator.
Galliano’s initial rise was meteoric. The 1984 graduation collection, Les Incroyables, inspired by the costumes of the French Revolution period, was famously bought by London designer store Browns, and the young designer was inundated with interview requests by fashion editors. Commenting on that first collection, a college contemporary of Galliano said: ‘It was streets ahead of everyone else. I felt physically sick. It was so good I felt I might as well give up designing because I would never get anywhere near that.’ Galliano immediately launched his own label and became the darling of London Fashion Week: within three years, he was British Designer of the Year. However, the bare facts of this rapid rise conceal a story of struggle, partly financial to secure backing and resources for each new collection, and partly personal as the strains of the fashion world’s expectations wore down the designer. He was always a highly strung and intense individual, sometimes literally trembling with nerves before a new collection was shown.
In the mid-1980s, Galliano became one of a group of young designers, including Alistair Blair and Richard James, backed by the Danish businessman Peder Bertelsen. He staged his first show in Paris in 1990, albeit without the support of Bertelsen, who had withdrawn from the fashion fray. Next, he found backing from Fayçal Amor, the businessman behind the Plein Sud label, although this partnership again faltered as the orders failed to materialise and the costs of Galliano’s extravagant shows soared. Despite an exalted media profile, Galliano was dropped by Amor and was at a low point in a promising career, apparently doomed to follow the path of many young British designers before and since: lauded too early, pressurised to the limit and obliged to drop the dreams of a signature collection and join the backroom design studio of a major foreign label. However, he had a powerful fairy godmother in the form of Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, who lobbied on his behalf in early 1994. ‘She flew me to America and introduced me to the right people,’ recalled Galliano. A backer was identified in the form of John Bult of American investment house PaineWebber. Within three weeks of Bult’s stepping in, Galliano had produced a small but perfectly formed collection of seventeen high-glamour outfits shown in the Parisian townhouse of Portuguese millionairess Sao Schlumberger. ‘The marketing director said, “Look John, you need to edit your collection, produce it in so many colours and so many fabrics, and you need to be really choosy about who you sell to,”’ recalled Galliano. ‘I really learnt a lot from that little collection.’
Friends and long-term collaborators rallied around, including the British designer, Steven Robinson, who was by Galliano’s side continuously until his tragically early death in 2007. Another key supporter was Lady Harlech, born Amanda Grieve, who acted as both stylist and muse for Galliano for many years before being lured away to work with Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel. They sensed that women were tired of dressing down, of the grungy looks that had dominated fashion through the early 1990s. Working day and night, they came up with a sharply focused collection inspired by the fitted tailoring of the 1950s and with a preponderance of outfits for the evening and cocktail hours. The fashion world went into a collective swoon. Back in Paris, he produced a second collection of fit-and-curve daywear and oriental-inspired evening wear, which had journalists and buyers grasping for superlatives. In just two collections, he had killed off deconstruction and encouraged women to dress up and dream again.
In 1995, Galliano landed a major breakthrough when he was appointed head designer at Givenchy by Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), the luxury goods conglomerate. Not since the days of Charles Frederick Worth had a British name pulled off such a coup in the capital of fashion. He completed one couture and two ready-to-wear collections before moving on to the ultimate prize—artistic director at Christian Dior, a fashion house also owned by LVMH. Simultaneously, he continued to develop his own signature label with a spectacular show in October 1996 staged as a circus in an empty wine warehouse. His first couture collection for Dior was presented in January 1997, an auspicious year for the house of Dior, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the New Look. Galliano had immersed himself in the Dior archive in rue Jean Goujon, much as he had done in the Victoria & Albert Museum as a student in the early 1980s. For once, he fell in love with a real personality from the past, Mitzah Bricard, a muse to British couturier Edward Molyneux in the 1930s and later to Dior himself. Part homage to Dior, part assertion of Galliano’s own romantic spirit, the collection was staged at the Opera Salon of the Grand Hotel in Paris and was hailed as a dazzling triumph. Among a plethora of ecstatic press comment, The International Herald Tribune summed it up: ‘Surely Galliano’s 16-year career has been a dress rehearsal for this sublime moment?’ Galliano’s finest homage to Dior himself, however, came eight years later in 2005 (autumn/winter) with a series of ten tableaux inspired by the couturier’s work, including the Bar suit, which has been frequently reinterpreted by Galliano.
The backing and security of LVMH also gave Galliano the platform to sort out his personal life, wher
e all-night partying and hedonism were the order of the day. Galliano stepped back from the brink to focus on his work. He believes strongly in the capacity for self-improvement. In 1995, still relatively fresh in Paris, he was eager to take lessons from the work of the great couturiers of the past, notably Vionnet, and contemporaries he admired, such as Azzedine Alaia. ‘I’m still learning,’ he said. ‘I’m only just beginning.’ Others of his generation, including John Flett, a former boyfriend and Central Saint Martins fellow graduate, who died in 1991, were not so fortunate. Galliano’s new sense of self-discipline was best exemplified by a new enthusiasm for aerobics and working out, including a regular six-mile jog along the river Seine in Paris. In January 2000, he said that he had found inspiration for a controversial ‘homeless chic’ couture collection during his jogging sessions, when running past the homeless people lining the river. He added that he hoped to expose the pure decadence of couture by ‘turning it inside out’.
In his 1997 biography, Colin McDowell highlighted Galliano’s love of historicism and the exotic allure of Orientalism. Those elements have continued to run through Galliano’s work ever since. He is a true Postmodern designer, drawing on a rich resource of references (although always decontextualised, as historian Farid Chenoune has pointed out). While as a student, he used the library as his source of inspiration, as a designer, he has travelled regularly (‘the most powerful source of ideas,’ he says). He loves the process of researching a collection, saying research feeds his mind—wherever it might take him. ‘Creativity has no nationality, so I don’t want to leave any stone unturned. I love understanding and seeing different cultures.’ Galliano is a fierce defender of the role of fashion. ‘Fashion is escapist, not elitist, and I think now more than ever it has a role to play,’ he said in 2008. ‘Dior dared women to dream, to bring back romance, femininity, and seduction. He brought joy back onto the streets. I think this is my role.’
Galliano’s work is often laced with unsettling elements and references (although rarely pushed as far as Alexander McQueen, who graduated from Saint Martins after Galliano). Referencing his student days at the club Taboo, he has explored sexual fantasy, most notably through his autumn/winter 2001 couture collection for Dior, which was unofficially dubbed ‘Freud or Fetish’. In a thought-provoking comment, he argued that Dior was ‘the first true fetishist designer. He had an Oedipus complex, he was in awe of his mother and his New Look was full of fetish symbolism.’ The shock of the arrival of a British designer at the head of a French fashion house has long since dissipated. Always well-mannered and appreciative of the glories of French cultural heritage, Galliano has adapted to Parisian style without losing his British sense of irreverence, displaying continuity in his creative evolution from his French Revolution college graduation collection. In recent years, he has shown himself to possess shrewd commercial instincts too: the autumn/winter 2008 ready-to-wear collection for Dior, full of classic luxury dressing, was skilfully pitched at the emerging luxury markets of Asia. Galliano’s story is far from over.
Further reading: John Galliano’s impact at Dior is eulogised and explored in Dior: 60 Years of Style (2007) by Farid Chenoune. A decade earlier, Colin McDowell wrote an insightful monograph on the designer, Galliano (1997), published in the year of his arrival at Dior. Galliano has been profiled exhaustively in the media since the very beginning of his career and was interviewed on several occasions by Roger Tredre in the early 1990s. See in particular ‘The Grind Behind the Glamour’ (1990) and ‘Galliano Meets His Maker’ (1992).
44 DONNA KARAN (1948–)
In 1996 when Donna Karan took her company to the stock market, New York magazine put her on its cover. The picture showed a youthful, doe-eyed woman with glossy long dark hair looking straight to camera, her hands before her mouth in a praying posture. The selling copy beneath read, ‘Donna Karan, Corporate Goddess. The most successful woman on Seventh Avenue has gone New Age, and now she’s going public. Will Wall Street love Donna as much as her customers do?’ Inside, journalist Rebecca Mead concluded, rightly, that Wall Street doubtless would. Donna Karan is the third and youngest of what fashion observers came to think of as the great triumvirate dominating American fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, the threesome—Lauren, Klein, Karan—who made the rest of the world take American fashion seriously for the first time.
Backed by the marketing, advertising and public relations techniques at which Americans excel, these three designers became global brands at an astonishing speed, each quickly establishing an identity which not only set them apart in terms of all-American modernity but neatly set them apart from each other. If Lauren appealed to the romantically aspirational, the dreamer and the fantasist, and Klein to a classic, understated, minimalist, country-mansion moneyed chic, Karan was sharply focused on young, ambitious working women, those moving up the corporate and professional ladders, paying their own bills and making their own rules. She put them in clothes—mostly black—that were easy, chic, carefree. While Lauren’s twenty-page runs of movie-still style advertisements recorded re-imagined mythic times and communities, Karan’s best-known multi-page advertisement from 1992 shows the inauguration of a woman president (played by model Rosemary McGrotha), all pinstripe suit and pearls. The ad’s slogan, ‘In Women We Trust,’ was Karan’s mantra and one reason the women of the press loved her. However hard they tried, she implied and women believed, male designers could never get inside women’s skins in the way she could. ‘I am a woman,’ Karan told Brenda Polan for The Mail on Sunday in 1994. ‘I’m a female designer, a working wife and mother. I understand the lives of other women and the last thing any one of us wants to do is worry about our clothes. We want a simple system whereby we get dressed fast and go.’
An article in Vogue in 1989 put it this way: ‘A kid from Queens is now Queen of Seventh Avenue. Karan’s professional rise has a lot to do with the current rise of “fortysomething” female executives, like herself, who want to look pulled together but not prim.’ Valerie Steele gives context to the relief with which women embraced Karan’s capsule-wardrobe dressing in the mid-1980s. ‘At a time when the strict man-tailored Dress for Success look was getting tired, and when executive women no longer felt so much pressure to look like men, Karan developed a sophisticated, sensual alternative to the business suit. Based on her own experience, Karan suspected that women would appreciate a system of dressing that was as easy as men’s wear, while also retaining the comfort and sensuality of clothes to fit a woman’s body.’
In fact, John T. Molloy’s Women: Dress for Success was one of the most proscriptive and pernicious little tomes ever written. It droned at tedious length and in tendentiously enervating prose about the imperative necessity for women to adopt the ‘skirted’ suit if they wanted to be respected in the workplace and advocated wearing it in background-blending tones and softened by only a pussy-cat bowed blouse tied right up under the chin. In response to the surrogate man theory of how to smash the glass ceiling American designer sportswear at all levels of the market had got harder-edged, bulkier and bigger-shouldered season by season. Karan’s collaboration with Louis dell’Olio at Anne Klein was in this vein—which made her new vision all the more sensational when she launched her own label in 1984. ‘Yes,’ Karan said at the time, ‘women’s clothes should be almost like men’s but they should be more comfortable, sensual, womanly.’
The designer was born Donna Faske in Queens, New York, in 1948. Her father, Gabriel, ran a haberdashery and tailoring shop called Gabby Faske and her mother, Helen, was a model and then a saleswoman on Seventh Avenue. Her father died when she was young and she was, she has said, bitter because the mothers of her friends did not go out to work as hers did. Nevertheless, she was, she said, obsessed with fashion from a very early age and, at fourteen, she began working part-time as a sales assistant in a boutique. She was a baby boomer growing up in the 1960s when youth fashion became a dominant force and girls were being encouraged to envisage careers in their future rather th
an simply marriage and motherhood. Karan was completely focused on design as her future career; she began designing clothes as a teenager, fitting patterns on her own body. After high school she attended Parsons School of Design but never graduated because, in 1969, a summer job at Anne Klein secured for her by her mother led to a permanent post as designer. Anne Klein was a major sportswear designer who pioneered the concept of tailored separates. ‘She was,’ said Karan, ‘a woman who understood women. I was in awe of her, she was such an innovator.’
After nine months she was fired because her concentration was not on the job but on Mark Karan, the boutique owner who was to become her first husband and the father of her daughter, Gabby. Anne Klein rehired her and by 1971 she held the post of associate designer. Anne Klein died in 1974 just five days after Karan had given birth to Gabby. Although Karan admitted to feeling ‘terribly guilty’, she went back to work immediately, working with a classmate from Parsons, Louis dell’Olio. Together they polished up the Anne Klein style, giving it some urban sophistication which precipitated it into the Fashion Week limelight. Suddenly, the international fashion press recognised it as a brand worth watching.
Ten years after taking over, the restless Karan decided it was time to move on, time to do something of her own. ‘It was time to start something from nothing,’ she told Ingrid Sischy. ‘That’s what I love to do the most. I wanted to start a new project which was going to be oriented around a system of dressing—my seven easy pieces. But my bosses at Anne Klein didn’t go for it so I decided to leave and do it for myself. I found leaving Anne Klein very hard to do.’ Since that epochal first Donna Karan collection and the press frenzy with which it was greeted, the growth of Karan’s company brand has been exponential. One of the selling points she loved to reiterate was that her body as well as her lifestyle more closely resembled that of most women—unlike most of her competitors. ‘I’m a woman with a rounded figure,’ she said. ‘I’m not a model size 8. I won’t design clothes that cannot be worn by a woman of size 12 or 14.’ She would use size and what she calls ‘the fallibility of a woman’s body’ as a bonding device with other women, especially the press, passing on tips like her trick of tying a sweater around the waist so that it draped concealingly around the hips, creating an illusion that all the perceived bulk in that area was knitwear.