Disclaimer: This essay was written in collaboration with ChatGPT 4o.
The following is a reading of a fashion show by John Galliano for Maison Margiela in 2024. You can watch the show, Artisanal, below (or here if the video doesn't load).
In Artisanal, the act of dressing is less a matter of presentation than of mediation—between the body and its image, the self and its concealments. The show stages a taxonomy of concealment, which may be schematised into four modes:
Each character in the show inhabits a quadrant of this conceptual matrix, performing a different relationship between surface and depth, concealment and disclosure.
The thief in his trench coat embodies complete superimposition. His body is wholly enveloped in fabric in a way that renders it irrelevant. The coat becomes a second skin, a visual cipher. The thief skips with mischief because he is unlocatable. There is no body here, only the idea of one—hidden, displaced, absent.
The puffed up dolls with hugely engorged limbs hide even more successfully beneath a complete superimposition. So totally are they given over to their covering that even their gate is affected; their bodies become puppeteering forms. They are fashion’s marionettes, manipulated by structural exaggeration. The totality of the superimposition here is so complete that identity and agency are suspended.
Diagonal to these figures in the matrix is the sole naked model of the show. She signifies incomplete revealing. She is naked even though she wears a dress, its upper portion is almost architecturally minimal—scaffolding rather than clothing—supporting the floating frills that surround her knees. The frills make her not entirely nude, yet the garment draws attention to what it fails to cover.
The gauze dress provides another quadrant: incomplete superimposition. The translucency of a gauze dress does the job of incompletely superimposing a shape on a shape. This is the first time the staging is nontrivially involved; it is important that there is some element of backlighting in order to form a silhouette of the hidden body beneath the external shell. Incompletely covered by a form which reveals its contents, the body haunts the surface of the garment.
Yet the most conceptually rich intervention in the show is the corset.
The corset resists easy categorisation in this fourfold scheme. A form-fitting corset sticks tight to the body, and so ought to reveal its geometry. But the corseted body is a distorted one. A corset does and does not reveal the body underneath; it changes the body and reveals that. Not a superimposition but a transmutation.
The show pivots on the corset: it opens with a spotlit corset on an otherwise naked torso; the bloated puppets derive their form from a comically cinched waist; upon closer inspection the naked model wears a clear plastic corset; even on the thief can we catch glimpses of a corset beneath his coat.
The show closes with curious figures: Dorothys from The Wizard of Oz. But these are not the white Midwestern girls of the 1939 film. These Dorothys are reimagined in a variety of ethnicities and body types, yet their gingham dresses remain, barely subverted. Why end here? Perhaps these Dorothys represent fashion’s repressed conservative longing, the fantasy of return. Or perhaps they are philosophical ciphers: avatars of the dreamer, the traveler between worlds, the seeker of home in the midst of artifice.
And what of makeup? The models’ faces are glossed to reflect like porcelain, creating a mirror surface where the viewer sees themselves. This is not simply an aesthetic choice—it is a thematic one. The makeup makes literal the idea that the model hides by reflecting us. The viewer becomes implicated in the act of concealment. The model hides? No—we hide.
Ultimately, Artisanal is not about clothing per se, but about the politics of visibility and the ontology of the self. The body, filtered through fashion, is never quite present, never quite absent. It is always in process—revealed, concealed, transformed, displaced.