A woman in a large inexperienced beehive with silver petal–painted eyes, carrying a ’50s three-quarter-sleeved clutch coat and a pair of pointy white pumps with bulbous molded heels and toting a capacious white bag was the opener. She marked the takeoff level for John Galliano’s most rounded and product-filled Maison Margiela assortment to date. “Lo-fi, sci-fi” was his tagline for it: phrases that got here by way of e mail reasonably than straight from the designer’s mouth, as he doesn’t seem on the finish of his exhibits now—one in all Margiela’s home traditions he absolutely values.

However this was an entirely Galliano journey, not an old-school Margiela one. He made a pleasant merge of vintage-y eccentricity, Japanese geisha styling, and colour—themes which have always been a part of Galliano’s design territory from the start, in fact. The excellent news was that, regardless of the acute teased updos and his casting of a number of androgynous boys to put on clothes, this was not one among his excursions right into a fantasia of previous: He had grounded it in a slew of believably wearable garments, for the primary time since he arrived at Margiela. At one finish of the spectrum, there was crystal embroidery resembling dangly earrings smothering a mint inexperienced ’50s coat; on the different, a practical tailor-made grass inexperienced go well with with skinny trousers and a physique jacket. In between, loads of skirts that may make us assume in a different way about slender, just-above-the-ankle proportions, possibly worn with fitted peplumed tops. After which, for night and occasions, quite a few clothes in terribly refined combos of kimono-inspired prints and tints—in addition to a glimpse of a gold satin bias-cut slip costume of the sort the designer introduced into style within the ’90s. Galliano is again on his sport once more—a reduction for individuals who supported him within the first place and a thrill for one more technology who’ve grown as much as see him by means of new eyes.