Zara by John Galliano Just Landed
While the designer may not be getting a Met exhibition, he does have a new collection.
The wait is finally over; the first iteration of Zara by John Galliano has arrived. The legendary couturier and ex-Margiela creative director teamed up with the Spanish fashion giant for “Re{form},” a new genderless collection that sees archival Zara pieces dismantled, distorted and rebuilt through couture techniques.
The first instalment, Vol.1, is less a traditional collaboration than a creative exchange between Galliano and Zara’s wardrobe history. Treating archival pieces as prototypes, the designer cuts, splices, shrinks, magnifies and reassembles them into entirely new forms, bringing his own fashion vocabulary into conversation with the everyday wardrobe.
The collection looks to “Les Incroyables” and “Les Merveilleuses,” the rebellious dandies and divas of post-Revolutionary France, while also drawing from gardening wardrobes and the cinematic glamor of film noir.
Some of the transformations are particularly unexpected. An oversized Zara shirt is foil-printed to resemble a leather coat, while a lace shift dress becomes a ruffled collar. Jackets are reworked with their pockets pulled into new positions to give the tailoring a more expressive attitude. Elsewhere, dresses are layered to create the illusion of coats.
The result is Zara as you’ve never seen it before: familiar pieces made strange, theatrical and completely new. Whether the fashion world needed this is yet to be determined, but collapsing the space between luxury and the high street is an effective way to allow more people to get involved in an (often) exclusionary world.
Check out the campaign above, shot by Steven Meisel, and head to the Zara website to shop the collection.
In other news, check out our favorite shows from Paris Fashion Week SS27.
