From the GQ archive: As John Galliano signs on as the first named creative director at Maison Martin Margiela since the label's secretive founder left in 2009, re-read our interview with one of the most controversial characters in the fashion industry from when he won Designer Of The Year at the 2006 GQ Men Of The Year Awards.
Paris, spring 2006. Juan Carlos - aged 46, born in Gibraltar, raised in Streatham, south London - enters the room sporting a sailor's tan and an H&E physique. He is dressed for a dawn pistol duel with Sonny Barger as refereed by Louis XIV and Tupac Shakur.
Actually, "enters" is too small a word for what happens when Galliano crosses a threshold. He blazes, surges, swash buckles through the door. Even if you didn't know who he was you'd know he was someone by the way he walks in. John Galliano doesn't enter a room. He arrives. Today, because it is just a normal fashion fabulous Wednesday in Paris, GQ's Designer Of The Year is dressed down ...ish. Battered, blue cowboy boots, jeans distressed to an artisan intensity, a wonky trucker's cap astand a run-over white leather biker's jacket with what looks like French Revolution graffiti scrawled on the back. On anyone else this ensemble would look hopelessly self-conscious. On Galliano it looks magnificently, effortlessly, raffishly piratical. Should Johnny Depp ever decide to go back to doing art house, Galliano would be a shoo-in for the part of Jack Sparrow.
While the rest of us have clothes, Galliano has "wardrobe". Every working morning is another chance for him to make some Rive Gauche Mr Benn and storyboard his character for the day (Apache Indian, spiv, gypsy, flamenco dancer, boxer perhaps?), cross-dressing through eras, mixing sartorial references, pickpocketing styles from different continents and silhouettes.
And Galliano's like this every day. Always has been. (As a boy, his mum would dress up him and his sisters Rosemary and Immacula, to the nines. "The Latin thing ran through the family," he says. "Even if you were going to the corner shop you were boiled up, perfumed up, scrubbed up, talc'ed up, before you set foot out of the house.") Always will be, probably. Always the trouser maverick, his personal style knows no limits, is immune to mockery and is always seeking new ways to charm, shock, sex up and entertain.
Last July, for instance, just after another successful menswear show, Galliano was convinced that he'd invented the future of male footwear. "John had done this amazing show where the guys' clothes were inspired by Frankenstein and the Munsters," says his friend and long-time musical collaborator, the DJ Jeremy Healy. "They were all wearing these six-inch high, crepe-soled shoes, which were intentionally made ridiculously long... about a size 20.
Next day, we were at John's studio and he came in wearing a pair, insisting that they were the coolest things ever. He tripped over three times and then fell down the stairs. We were all laughing, but still he wouldn't take them off. That's the thing about John, he really loves fashion. In the 22 years I've known him, he's never fallen out of love with it. He's still playing and messing around with it and when it's going well, it makes him genuinely happy."
And what's not to be happy about? GQ is interviewing Galliano - a rich man these days, with a super-posh home in a grand hotel particulaire in the Marais district of Paris - in a spacious atelier. We are taking a profligately spread lunch in his tennis-court-sized office, doubling as a library, gallery, lounge, dining room, boardroom and fitting room.
During the week, he flits from here - the engine room of the John Galliano label (and home to his latest, rather astonishing menswear collection inspired by Gorillaz, Los Angeles and Roman Polanski's take on Oliver Twist) - to Christian Dior's headquarters on the la-di-da Avenue Montaigne, where he is in charge of the famous French house's ready-to-wear and couture collections, his mind's creative engine whirring double time as he goes. Does he ever worry that with so many collections to design he might dry up creatively? "No... Nah. Not-at-awl," he says, his voice a bit like Mick Jagger's or Kenneth Williams' - fluctuating from aristo to barrow boy to theatreland camp, sometimes all within a sentence. "It's like being a cocky
'jugg-lah', innit? You juggle with two things, then you want a third and a fourth, otherwise you get bored don't you?"
Things weren't always so great, though. "In the late Eighties, when he didn't have any money, things were looking grim, John went through some really dark times," says Jeremy Healy. "If he wasn't going to make it as a designer, he wasn't going to be anything."
Meaning? "Oh, he would have killed himself," says Healy.
Do you really think so? "I know so."
I've known Galliano on and off since 1988 when I first interviewed him for London's Evening Standard. Back then, his studio was a space above a petrol station in Fulham, west London. Not grand, but a vast improvement on the previous scuzzy Mayfair address which had been imaginatively redecorated by a terrorist bombing.
As we talked, Galliano sat on an old wooden captain's chair that he had restored himself and at a desk that he had rescued from a skip. There were swatches and magazine cuttings everywhere. He showed me a letter from a fan that started, "Dear John, King of the Jungle, dust my lemon life with powder pink and sugar sweets".
It was clear to everyone back then that Galliano had a brilliant eye, a prodigious creative talent, verve, adventure and a dashing sense of the sublime and the ridiculous. But while he had the fashion press eating out of his hands, cash flow was a problem.
Born in 1960, Galliano went to London's Central St Martins to study fashion design and earned extra cash working as an assistant to the Savile Row tailor Tommy Nutter, suit maker to Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Sir Elton John and others. "At the end of my time there, Tommy let me make a pair of boxer shorts which was a real revelation and so exciting," laughs Galliano. "Mostly I was doing the photocopying and making the tea.
I learned about workmanship, craftsmanship, construction, stitching.
OK, it was all too heavy for my sensibility but it was a real experience. Even now my tailoring has that lightness of touch that you get on Savile Row."
Significantly, around this time - the early Eighties - Galliano also discovered the extracurricular activity of nightclubbing. "The stuff that happened outside college was really relevant too," he says. "Soho back then meant men in beige raincoats, strip joints, ring the bell and go up. Some of the pubs still had sawdust on the floor. You had trade mixing with the theatre crowd and some great clubs. Le Beat Route, Taboo, the Wag. It was wonderful."
Like his freaky friends Leigh Bowery (a nightclub fixture and performance artist whose party trick was "weeing himself") and Trojan (who once cut off half his ear in the name of rebellion), Galliano was committed to fashion, whirling from street trash to highbrow culture and back again - attending, for instance, a six-hour and 28-minute long, three-screen showing of Abel Gance's 1927 film, Napoléon, so he could marvel at the wardrobe and art direction, then rushing back to St Martins for the Wednesday ritual of "getting some jersey from Berwick Street market and using the college overlocking machine to create something for Taboo on a Thursday night".
Galliano's early fashion shows reflected that sense of theatre, anarchy and hedonism. In one of his first catwalk forays, for instance, he decided that the models should brandish wet fish as accessories. "But one model got a bit overexcited and threw a wet mackerel into the lap of Joan Burnstein [fashion doyenne and proprietor of the Browns empire]. The amazing thing was, Joan just laughed and actually bought the collection. She's been a supporter ever since."
Others would fall under Galliano's spell too. His first ever paying customer was Diana Ross and in 1984, when fashion retailer Joseph saw clothes from Galliano's Danton-inspired degree show in the window displays of Browns in South Molton Street, he was so excited he bought it at full price from the Browns shop, and put it in his own window.
Now John was up and running.
He got financial backing from Danish businessman Peder Bertelsen, hired his team (most of whom are still with him) and in 1989 showed in Paris for the first time... just as his backer decided to pull out.
With his label facing financial ruin, and his morale at an all-time low, Galliano decided to move to Paris, where he slept on friends' floors.
Salvation arrived in 1993 when Anna Wintour, editor of American
Vogue and a loyal Galliano supporter, fixed a meeting with a new backer, John Bult of the Paine Webber banking group, and persuaded Saõ Schlumberger, the Portuguese socialite, to lend Galliano her mansion for his fashion show. John hasn't looked back since.
Now chief designer of France's haute couture flagship, Christian Dior, Galliano creates more than a dozen Dior collections a year including skiwear, lingerie, golfwear, cruise- and resort-wear, jewellery and accessories as well as the ready-to-wear and haute couture collections. In 2004, for the first time since 1986, he also unveiled a menswear collection.
Possibly inspired by David Beckham's admission that he occasionally wore Victoria's knickers, John Galliano menswear debuted with a lingerie-centric effort. Black suspenders trailed from lace-lapelled waistcoats and a coyote fur coat was lined in white lace (think Regency meets Rod Stewart). "There's no specific formula," said Galliano at the time. "I have a very haute couture way of working. It starts with a waistcoat, a very
'gentlemen's club' sort of waistcoat. But I've treated the waistcoat as if it were a corset, so that it becomes the first layer in the process of putting clothes on the body. There is constant motion between layering and revealing."
Why did he decide to start doing men's clobber? "Male friends liked what I wore and they started asking: 'When are you going to do something for us?'"
Two years and several collections in, Galliano is pleasantly surprised by the pervading politeness and punctuality of the menswear industry which, he says, "is much less hysterical, less bitchy and less competitive" than the womenswear side of things. "The models turn up on time, never get lost, are well-mannered and don't burst into tears all the time. It's fantastic."
Not like Zoolander, then? "No!" he screams. "Not at all! I was in Zoolander, you know." (He's the Native American in the crowd at the Slashie awards in the opening scene.) "Men have got more of a discerning eye," he says. "They appreciate cut and details, things that aren't so obvious. They like things that have cachet and gentlemanliness." "Above all," he says, "John Galliano menswear is all about good design. And men have been short-changed by good design for too long." It's considered and well thought-out, he says, with specially developed fabrics that come pre-loaded with personality, age and wear.
The problem with most men's clothing, he says, is that it is "badly cut and my craft with menswear, I suppose, is working with proportion; enhancing a man's good bits but also hiding a multitude of sins. We do wild stuff but we also do beautifully cut, sexy, virile suits, with that Latin silhouette. I mean, men want to wear clothes that give them a nice arse and good pecs, don't they?"
Originally published in the October 2006 issue of British GQ.
See more from the GQ Men Of The Year Hall of Fame here.
