On the Podcast: Gwendoline Christie in Conversation with John Galliano at Forces of Fashion

The last time John Galliano and Gwendoline Christie were in the same room together was in January. It was less a “room” and more a squalid hinterland beneath the Pont d’Alexandre III in Paris, where Galliano staged his spring/summer 2024 collection for Maison Margiela Artisanal. Fugitives, pickpockets, and streetwalkers stumbled around street lamps like broken puppets bewitched with life. It was a world of rib-crunching corsets and moth-eaten mirkins, at the center of which was Christie in a Latex gown with extreme pannier hips and the face of an embalmed 18th-century madam. “With great compassion and love you were able to see into the heart of me,” Christie told Galliano at this year’s Forces of Fashion London. “And I’m not sure I’ve ever been treated so beautifully and so celebratorily in my entire life.”

Together, Christie and Galliano reexamine the legend of Galliano with exacting detail: his Les Incroyables graduate proposal, the debut collection he devised on a shoestring budget in 1994 at São Schlumberger’s Left Bank hôtel particulier; his arrival at Givenchy in 1995 and his eventual takeover of Dior in 1996. The designer credits hairstylist Orlando Pita, makeup artist Pat McGrath, and milliner Stephen Jones—among many other lifelong collaborators—with the remarkable visions he brought to life.

Galliano continues to work with that “village” at Maison Margiela, which started in 2014 with a home visit from Martin himself. “I wasn’t quite sure whether I could do the job,” he says. “And then I had the great honor of meeting Martin for tea. I got to understand what was going on inside his head. His feelings, his loves, his hates. How difficult he found menswear or how he would’ve loved to have done more historical things, but I had cornered the market on history. I can’t tell you how incredible that was. I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to give this a try.” That he did. You can listen to John Galliano’s conversation with Gwendoline Christie on this week’s special episode of The Run-Through.