John Galliano on Martin Margiela, dressing Zendaya, and his love of the process

ELI5/TLDR

Different conversation from the masterclass already in the vault — this one is the post-mortem to the January 2024 Maison Margiela Artisanal show that went viral, recorded right after Galliano’s Met Gala double with Zendaya and Kim Kardashian. He talks about being given Martin Margiela’s actual blessing to make the house his own, why he stopped denying his own theatricality, the 100-year-old fictional duchess he wrote into Zendaya’s red carpet, and a phrase he keeps returning to — “the process” — which is less a method and more a way of standing very still inside a long, expensive obsession until the cloth tells you what it wants.

The Full Story

Margiela actually said yes

The most surprising thing in the interview is that the question fashion has obsessed over for a decade — is Galliano allowed to be Galliano inside Margiela? — was answered in the room by the founder himself. They sat down. They went through the archives. And then Martin gave him cover.

“He said, you know, take what you will from the DNA. John, protect yourself and make this house your own.”

Galliano keeps coming back to how generous that was, and how clever. By the time the meeting happened, Margiela had already left fashion entirely — was a working artist, expressing himself elsewhere — so nobody, including Galliano, could ever credibly say “this is what Martin would have done now.” The blessing closed off a whole genre of bad-faith argument.

“Everything I’m doing here is for Maison Margiela, and it’s been here nearly ten years now.”

So when interviewers ask about the supposed contrast between Margiela and Galliano, the line he comes back to is that the contrast is fake. The pyramid the studio uses to plot collections — work-in-progress, the twist, hidden beauty, the unfinished symphony — is Margiela DNA he found himself naturally drawn to.

Why he stopped denying himself

The arc he describes is almost a small confession. When he first got to Margiela he was deliberately suppressing the spectacle instinct — the bias cut, the bar jacket, the theatrical runway — because he had been so identified with those things at Galliano that they had cornered him.

“I’d had a little experience where, perhaps from a personal point of view, I’d pushed myself into a corner where the bias cut became so famous that’s all people talked about… I didn’t want that to happen either, because that can be very restricting.”

White box shows. Focus on the clothes. Be quiet. Then the pandemic happened, he threw himself into film with Olivia Dench and Nick Knight, and when audiences came back he sensed they were starving for physicality. He didn’t want the white box anymore. He didn’t want to deny the showman either.

“I can’t deny JG. I am John Galliano.”

The result was the Cinema Inferno collection, then the January 2024 Spring Couture under the Pont Alexandre III — the show that went genuinely viral. He still seems puzzled by why.

“I think the resounding feeling is one of emotion… that we created an emotion that perhaps people were hankering to see.”

Young viewers who had only ever known him through legend started imitating Leon’s walk on TikTok and shoving pillows up their skirts. Older ones told him they thought that kind of fashion show was extinct.

The Met Gala — Kim, then the Zendaya plot twist

Two looks, two completely different processes.

Kim Kardashian had reportedly been “stalking him for about five years” through Alexis, and the Met was finally the right moment. They did fittings in LA, then in Paris. The dress was silver metal, fused to look like lace, linked together like origami over a corseted shape. The sweater they threw over it — the now-famous distressed cardigan — was the off-kilter detail that made the look. They lightened her makeup, took her ash blonde two months early so the roots could grow in slightly, did tonic rinses. The whole point was sensuousness, not perfection.

Zendaya was supposed to wear one Margiela look. They worked from a mood board, did sketches, ink, no colour, working out which kind of drama she wanted (“they’d come to the right place for sure”). The dress they built together was a silhouette he describes as “very her.”

Then she asked him to leave the room for five minutes.

“I saw Law and her running around the back with this huge bundle, and next door she put on this dress and sailed through, and I was just like, my God, where did you get that from.”

The dress was his. His first Galliano couture, originally worn by Veronica Webb. Zendaya had bought it. She owned the piece. She knew the entire history.

“I got quite emotional. Wow. This is someone that’s, you know, very, very special.”

That night he went home and wrote a treatment for her — a short story to give the dress narrative scaffolding. He invented “the Duchess of Lexington and 77th” — Lexington/77 being the subway stop nearest the Metropolitan — a woman who had fallen asleep on the train for a hundred years and woken up, the doors sliding open and shut, distant memories, half-convinced she was at her country house. Zendaya, who normally has to construct her own backstory for a look, told him later she really enjoyed that someone had done it for her. The “effortless” shapes she made on the carpet were pulled from that fiction.

She opened the red carpet in the Margiela. She closed it in the vintage Galliano. He notes drily: “historically that has never happened.”

The process — actually unpacked

The phrase “the process” recurs throughout the conversation. What he means by it is unfussy and almost monastic. It is mostly time.

“It takes time. It takes time to develop. I mean, it’s — I think it’s worth it.”

For the January show the foundations took longer than the clothes. The corsetry alone — body-modifying, custom-engineered, with Pilates-style breathing — was where most of the hours went. “I would say that I think longer was spent on the undergarments than the actual collection itself.” Some dresses took 1,820 hours of refining. A simple bias-cut velvet skirt required artisans pulling each fibre of the velour out of the seam with a toothbrush so the seams would disappear.

The illusion was the headline trick. Almost none of the men’s-wear-looking pieces were what they seemed.

“It was an illusion as well… what we wanted to do was to create the illusion of men’s wear fabrics and the illusion that it was in that fabric.”

A heavy-looking military overcoat was printed on featherlight fabric, then layered with double organza, lint, and chiffon couture techniques to fake weight, then printed again on tulle to fake the moonlight. “The thing was as light as a feather.” A herringbone was printed onto cotton poplin normally used for summer dresses. They worked in a darkroom, lighting tweed with directional torches to mimic Brassaï’s photographs, and that became the artwork on the cloth. Some pieces had a watercolour-style “retrograding” — starting as a linear sketch on the shoulder, becoming fully 3D on the hem. A lace dress had godets where the seams were replaced with encrusted sequin flowers — no stitches, just engineering.

A few weeks after the show they held an open day. Students, atelier staff, anyone who wanted to come. Spread the research out. Show the brassaï mood boards, the porcelain-doll references, the printing tests, the toothbrush-and-pile work. The show is over so fast people are essentially in a trance — the open day was a way to reward whoever wanted to actually look.

How he stays inspired

He shops, and he loves it.

“I love walking the streets and going into boutiques and talking to the managers.”

He looks at every film, every piece of music, every art form. Music in particular he uses operationally — different pieces change how the team drapes or cuts. Vivaldi gets you a frill. Something more aggressive gets you a staccato. He plays scent into the studio the same way — gin on a woman’s breath, a tangerine pigment on a lip, the cologne some young boy’s father might have worn under a bridge in 1950. All of it builds the character before any cloth is touched.

In fittings he and his muses don’t talk.

“I’m just looking and checking and fitting.”

The muses speak with their bodies. The team translates the body language into cuts.

”I’ve never relied on my work to find happiness”

The interview ends gently, on contentment. He says he’s content, in a way he wasn’t before. The reason is somewhere unexpected.

“I’ve never relied on my work, or I’ve never relied on anything, to find happiness. I realise that that is in my head… when you do, I think sometimes you can be disappointed. But I know that by putting on just a piece of music, I can change my mood really quickly. I mean, nanoseconds.”

It is the closest he gets to talking about recovery directly — only obliquely, by mentioning that when he came back from time out, surrounding himself with young adults at Margiela was electrifying both ways. He continues, he says, to atone. The documentary was meant to be a one-time confession, a way to share the story with young people in the industry. He thought he’d never have to talk about it again.

“There was no escape. It was like a confession. I couldn’t flinch or move or anything.”

Key Takeaways

The actual blessing exists. Martin Margiela personally told Galliano to “take what you will from the DNA, protect yourself, and make this house your own.” That is on the record, in his words, and closes the perpetual debate about whether Galliano belongs at Margiela.
Suppressing yourself is its own corner. His early Margiela period was deliberately quiet — white box shows, no theatre. He came around to the idea that denying the showman in himself was as restricting as being trapped by the bias cut at Galliano had been.
The Zendaya story. She bought a vintage Galliano couture (Veronica Webb’s piece), kept it secret, asked him to leave the fitting room, then walked out wearing his own past. He went home and wrote her a short story — the Duchess of Lexington and 77th — to give the look a narrative engine.
Custom-dress process is collaborative narrative. Mood board → quick ink sketches with no colour to test direction → silhouette work → fittings in the wearer’s home city → 360 fitting up and down stairs because it’s not a shoot, it’s an uncontrolled environment.
“Homework.” At the end of fittings he takes a stack of photocopies and reviews them through the lens — checking how the look sits 360°, since at the Met or on the carpet there is no styling rescue.
The illusion principle. Most of the menswear-looking pieces in January were trompe-l’œil — featherlight fabrics printed and layered to fake weight and history. A military coat you could roll up like a scarf. The collection’s “soul” was paint, not cloth.
Foundations before clothes. More hours went into the corset engineering than the dresses on top. Body modification was the actual collection; everything else hung on it.
A simple bias velvet skirt is a feat. Toothbrushes, hair-by-hair pile work to make seams disappear. Couture is mostly invisible labour.
Music is operational, not ambient. Different pieces produce different cuts. Scent is layered in too. The studio is essentially a multi-sensory mood machine.
In fittings, silence. He and his muses don’t speak — body language is the medium, and he says explicitly he picks collaborators who know when to shut up.
The open day. A genuinely good idea — invite students and the house in to see all the research after the show, because the runway moves too fast for anyone to absorb the work.
1,820 hours on a single dress. Time is the substrate. Refinement is most of the job. The clock is always ticking and the dress is always still being refined.

Claude’s Take

This is the comfortable companion to the masterclass video — same person, much less teacherly, more reflective. The masterclass was about how he cuts. This is about how he survives. The two genuinely-distinct contributions are the Margiela blessing (which removes a long-running argument from the discourse) and the Zendaya anecdote (which would be unbearable from anyone else but is told with real surprise). The “process” framing is the weakest part — it is mostly synonyms for time and obsession — but the specifics behind it are not weak: 1,820 hours on a dress, toothbrushes pulling velour pile, faking a military coat with chiffon, a fictional duchess written at midnight to give an actress a backstory she didn’t ask for. Score 8: not earth-shattering on its own, but a real complement to the masterclass and worth holding onto for the unusually frank account of why he stopped denying himself.

John Galliano on Martin Margiela, dressing Zendaya, and his love of the process | System