Ire. Incredulity. Intrigue. Those are just a few of the many public reactions voiced when it was announced, in March, that Zara, whose parent company, Inditex, is the largest fashion retailer in the world, had engaged the couturier John Galliano—the defining talent of our time in that rarefied métier—to create a collection. Those reactions, of course, paled in both number and intensity to the response when, last month, Galliano announced, in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, that a planned career retrospective there would not be taking place next spring. “I remain fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past,” Galliano said in a statement at the time, referring to several antisemitic and anti-Asian outbursts in late 2010 and 2011, “particularly the hurt I caused to the Jewish and Asian communities, and I remain deeply sorry…. I also recognise and respect that an exhibition honouring my work would be painful for some.”
Both Galliano’s work and his name have long resonated on a wider cultural platform. People who have never worn his clothes have deep-rooted and passionately held opinions about them and him. Which is why he’s been working on this Zara project in a sun-drenched atelier inside a handsome villa in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt—literal and metaphorical miles from the chattering gossip of that city’s fashionable arrondissements. Paris is the scene of some of Galliano’s greatest triumphs—nearly three decades of critically acclaimed shows that shifted the axis of fashion again and again—but also of his lowest moment: his dismissal from the house of Dior following those outbursts, fueled, he said, by drug and alcohol addiction. (Galliano is now 15 years sober.)
LES MERVEILLEUSES
Galliano’s Zara silhouettes (on, from left: Riguelle, Nhial, and Ruth Deng), exaggerated and arcane, resemble an aristocratic band of dandy rebels dating back to the French Revolution.
When I met with Galliano—dressed down in baggy shorts and an olive green knitted shirt from Dario Vitale’s one-and-done Versace collection—in July, The Met retrospective, not yet announced, was not up for discussion. His new collection—or collaboration, or partnership, or pas de deux—with Zara, begun in hushed secrecy in January of this year, had its genesis even earlier, in 2022, when Galliano first met Marta Ortega Pérez, the nonexecutive chair of the board of Inditex and the brain behind Zara’s collaborations. “Marta really supports creativity,” Galliano says. “And she’s obsessed with fashion.”
In the fall of 2022, that obsession led to an exhibition of the work of the photographer Steven Meisel at Ortega Pérez’s MOP Foundation in Inditex’s hometown of La Coruña, in northwestern Spain. “Steven’s been one of my biggest supporters in illustrating my work,” Galliano says, recalling his seminal 1994 American Vogue portfolio, which led to the designer achieving sufficient financial backing to stage what became his legendary all-black fall-winter show that same year. Galliano and his longtime partner, Alexis Roche, went to Spain for Meisel, met Ortega Pérez, and “the relationship started blossoming,” he says. “And then she asked, Would I be interested in some kind of collaboration?”
