For whom do we dress, and for what? For our true selves, for real-life situations and the people we come in contact with therein? Or do those now matter less than the selves we create for social media and the audience we find there?
That sometimes antagonistic dialogue between real life and fictionalized Instagram life has been a topic of conversation for some time. In his Maison Margiela Artisanal collection on Wednesday morning, John Galliano officially brought the question into the world of haute couture at a spot previously unexplored — its very core. In the lust for social media relevance, couturiers, like the rest of fashion, have pushed hard to capture the small screen-viewing audience, opting for elaborate, picture-perfect sets and fancy-folk front rows (well, fancy doesn’t always apply, but you the get the drift). Galliano took it a dramatic step further. He played to the camera with the clothes themselves.
Don’t they all? No, they don’t. Not this way; not so far. “When I came back [after the Dior exit],” Galliano said before his show, “I saw that people were watching shows differently — like this,” he extended his phone arm. “They’re not watching the show. They’re taking pictures of the show.”
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