Innovative Minds: Gaultier, Alaïa & Galliano
Fashion needs creative minds to keep it going and constantly reinvent looks, season after season. Jean-Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaïa John Galliano are some of the industry’s most creative - and controversial - designers, whose back catalogues of vintage pieces remain constantly in demand.
Jean-Paul Gaultier
At the beginning of 2020, Jean-Paul Gaultier announced his retirement from fashion with a blockbuster show in Paris. Known as the ‘enfant terrible of fashion’, Gaultier originally scored a job with Pierre Cardin by speculatively sending him sketches, and went on to make his name by fearlessly subverting gender and sexuality as well as creating costumes for everyone from Madonna to Marilyn Manson.
Azzedine Alaïa
The son of Tunisian wheat farmers, Azzedine Alaïa’s idiosyncratic approach to raw sex appeal, minimal lines and maximal construction saw him garner a cult appeal in the 1980s. Known for the lavish dinners in his atelier as much as his take-it-or-leave-it approach to the fashion calendar, Alaïa is celebrated as a truly great mind in fashion, and passed away in 2017.
John Galliano
In his 90s heyday, Gibraltar-born designer John Galliano was one of the most innovative and spectacular designers, along with McQueen, showing collections that merged extreme theatricality with spellbinding design. Following his much-publicised anti-Semitic rant in 2011, he was fired from Dior and now helms Maison Margiela, showing his first collection in London in 2015.