Deconstructing Galliano: the man behind Dior puts his work on show
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Your support makes all the difference.Fashion's favourite fantasist, John Galliano, will be the subject of an exhibition at the Design Museum in London later this year. The exhibition, entitled Galliano at Dior, will be the first to cover his five-year tenure at Christian Dior, the most esteemed couture house in Paris.
Gemma Curtin, the curator, said: "We chose him because out of all the British designers he has reached the pinnacle. Galliano is an extraordinary talent. The fact that he has breathed new life into the most exalted of fashion houses is incredible." The last big fashion exhibition at the Design Museum was of the British designer Paul Smith, in 1996.
The Galliano exhibition will draw on the house's private archive and attempt to show the process of creating fashion, with initial sketchbook ideas, toiles (prototype garments), embroideries and about 80 finished couture and ready-to-wear garments, through to the glossy marketing of the Dior products featuring the advertising campaigns shot by Nick Knight.
Instead of the usual static and often soulless exhibition, the Design Museum is promising that its presentation will get under the skin of Galliano and evoke the pace, imagination and excitement of a catwalk show.
Music by the DJ Jeremy Healey, a long-term Galliano collaborator, will be pumped out of the public address system and videos will show the catwalk and backstage footage of frenzied models, hair stylists and make-up artists. The exhibition opens on 30 November, and is a must-see event for anyone interested in the fashion business, not least because John Galliano is a designer who has consistently shocked and delighted his audience.
For his spring/summer 2000 Christian Dior couture collection he was inspired, he said at the time, by the down and outs along the banks of the Seine. His entire collection was deconstructed to within an inch of its life; jackets were printed with newspaper print, models were daubed with mud and wore belts made out of miniature whisky bottles. Hardly the stuff couture clients' dreams are made of.
Galliano's flights of fancy are, however, always matched by his technical prowess. It is this explosive combination – creativity and technical know-how, matched with a zeal for dramatic presentation – that has made him a roaring success at Dior.
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