THE SPIRIT of disgraced British designer John Galliano hung like Banquo’s ghost over the Dior collection yesterday in Paris in a momentous, highly charged and sad day for fashion.
Crowds of onlookers, police, paparazzi and camera teams thronged the Rue de Varenne at the Rodin Museum to watch guests arrive while outside a young man dressed in animal skins carried a placard bearing the words “The King is Gone”.
More like a funeral than a fashion show and without the usual star-studded front row guests, it drew a full house with everyone, international buyers and press alike, aware that they were witnessing the last hurrah of a talented but troubled genius.
This was the designer, after all, who as the creative head of Dior for 15 years revitalised a decaying bourgeois brand and turned it into an international financial success story.
Making a startling and unprecedented appearance on the runway before the show, Dior chief executive Sidney Toledano drew a spontaneous round of applause as he delivered an address in which he referred to the House of Dior, founded in 1947, as embodying “France’s image and its values around the world”.
Without once mentioning Galliano’s name, he said it was “deeply painful to see it [Dior] associated with the disgraceful statements attributed to the designer . . . It is our collective duty never to forget the Holocaust . . . We must publicly recommit ourselves to the values of the House of Dior.”
As a piece of adroit stage management and damage limitation, it was a brilliant coup de théâtre expressing, in effect, that the show must go on.
In the circumstances, the billowing black cloak and floppy hat that opened it might have looked funereal and macabre, but this big collection of some 62 outfits was a rerun of many of the familiar elements that defined Galliano’s flamboyant and romantic style.
There was nothing particularly new or surprising; its highwaymen coats, velvet knickerbockers, high- waisted tweed jackets and pageboy trousers evoked the dandyism of the English Romantic poets, ever a favourite theme.
Fur, a trend both on and off the catwalk, gave everything a luxurious look, but although beautiful and glamorous, the collection lacked Galliano’s more mischievous, flirtatious flourishes.
In a dramatic finale, in place of Galliano’s usual swaggering appearance, the atelier’s workers – more than 30 men and women, the “petits mains” in their white coats – took to the stage to tumultuous cheering and catcalls from the crowd.
It was an unforgettable moment which had many in the audience in tears.
Galliano’s career as a fashion designer was effectively buried yesterday. Although he has issued a statement unreservedly apologising for his drunken rant in a Marais pub, he is contesting the allegations and denies claims made against him.
Nevertheless, the release of the video appearing to show him making anti-Semitic remarks was the nail in the coffin that turned his suspension into dismissal.