Ire. Incredulity. Intrigue. Those are just a few of the many public reactions voiced when it was announced, in March, that Zara, whose parent company, Inditex, is the largest fashion retailer in the world, had engaged the couturier John Galliano – the defining talent of our time in that rarefied métier – to create a collection. Those reactions, of course, paled in both number and intensity to the response when, in August, Galliano announced, in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, that a planned career retrospective there would not be taking place next spring. “I remain fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past,” Galliano said in a statement at the time, referring to several antisemitic and anti-Asian outbursts in late 2010 and 2011, “particularly the hurt I caused to the Jewish and Asian communities, and I remain deeply sorry… I also recognise and respect that an exhibition honouring my work would be painful for some.”

Both Galliano’s work and his name have long resonated on a wider cultural platform. People who have never worn his clothes have deep-rooted and passionately held opinions about them and him. Which is why he’s been working on this Zara project in a sun-drenched atelier inside a handsome villa in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt – literal and metaphorical miles from the chattering gossip of that city’s fashionable arrondissements. Paris is the scene of some of Galliano’s greatest triumphs – nearly three decades of critically acclaimed shows that shifted the axis of fashion again and again – but also of his lowest moment: his dismissal from the house of Dior following those outbursts, fuelled, he said, by drug and alcohol addiction. (Galliano is now 15 years sober.)

Galliano’s Zara silhouettes (on, from left: Riguelle, Nhial and Ruth Deng), exaggerated and arcane, resemble an aristocratic band of dandy rebels dating back to the French Revolution.

When I met with Galliano – dressed down in baggy shorts and an olive-green knitted shirt from Dario Vitale’s one-and-done Versace collection – in July, The Met retrospective, not yet announced, was not up for discussion. His new collection – or collaboration, or partnership, or pas de deux – with Zara, begun in hushed secrecy in January of this year, had its genesis even earlier, in 2022, when Galliano first met Marta Ortega Pérez, the non-executive chair of the board of Inditex and the brain behind Zara’s collaborations. “Marta really supports creativity,” Galliano says. “And she’s obsessed with fashion.”

In the autumn of 2022, that obsession led to an exhibition of the work of the photographer Steven Meisel at Ortega Pérez’s MOP Foundation in Inditex’s hometown of La Coruña, in northwestern Spain. “Steven’s been one of my biggest supporters in illustrating my work,” Galliano says, recalling his seminal 1994 American portfolio, which led to the designer achieving sufficient financial backing to stage what became his legendary all-black autumn/winter show that same year. Galliano and his longtime partner, Alexis Roche, went to Spain for the Meisel exhibition, met Ortega Pérez and “the relationship started blossoming,” he says. “And then she asked, Would I be interested in some kind of collaboration?”

His answer: no.

The technical proficiency of Zara – from fabric sourcing to manufacturing – spurred Galliano to an all-in expression of his talents. “I had no intentions to dumb down,” he says.

Galliano laughs. That, at least, was his initial response, while still consumed by his role as creative director at Maison Margiela, where he’d been working since 2014 – although interest was certainly present. “A long, long time ago, I had lots of conversations with my dear friend Alber [Elbaz] and he was always super excited about doing something for the high street,” Galliano says. But after leaving Margiela in 2024, Galliano had been pointedly quiet, deadheading roses in his country garden in Picardy, just north of Paris. He and Ortega Pérez had kept in touch, meeting frequently for lunch and, on one of these occasions, Galliano soft-launched a new concept – Re{form} was the name he floated – “and,” Galliano tells me, “she said: ‘Yes, let’s do it.’”

The idea that Galliano explained to Ortega Pérez is now a collection, titled Re{form} Zara Authored by the Couturier John Galliano. The unwieldy moniker is partly for legal reasons – the John Galliano name, as a brand, is still owned by LVMH – but also creative: as Re{form} suggests, Galliano isn’t designing entirely from scratch but, rather, reworking existing garments to discover something new. “This is an innovation – this idea of going in and treating their existing garments,” he says. “I called it Zara’s archives… but in this fast age, what denotes an archive?”

What Galliano called the rest of us would, perhaps more pragmatically, call . “Basically, it was the garments that were sitting around,” he says. “They became my working prototypes.” Re{form} began life as a selection of Zara archetypes – a long wool-mix coat, a slip dress, a cotton shirt – the kind of pieces most of us have. He and his team then cut these pieces, pressed them and turned them inside out and upside down to transform each one into a Galliano original. “How could I change the form – reinvent it, re-represent it?” was the kind of question Galliano proposed to himself, not as creator but as re-creator. “There were no limits.”

Galliano’s eyes are gleaming as he walks me through his complex creative process (“To watch him at work is an inspiration,” says Ortega Pérez) – though the process, incidentally, is all I can see. The final clothes of his first Re{form} collection, photographed for this story the previous day, were already on a plane back to La Coruña, so Galliano relied on images to illustrate his new modus operandi. We flicked through stacks of photographs to chart the alchemical transformation of Zara pieces from everyday garments to something exceptional.

A wool-mix coat is cut off in front, its pockets pushed further and further back, lapels extending, tails creeping down the leg. An entire lace-trimmed slip – “a perfectly lovely little summer dress,” in Galliano’s words – inches its way up the body to become little more than an extravagant jabot at the neck. A Zara shirt, sized up to triple or quadruple XL, becomes a jacket when printed with a trompe l’oeil leather pattern. Pockets are twisted and repositioned to shift how bodies behave in the clothes. “It’s what hackers do, what DJs do – re-sampling, digital mixing,” Galliano says. “It’s the grammar of today.”

“Could I get these almost haute couture posturings?” he asks – rhetorically, because of course he can. “There are things that obviously run in my veins.”

Even today, watching Galliano’s earlier shows on YouTube makes the hair on the back of one’s neck stand up – for both seasoned fashion observers and newer generations of fans – and his new Zara pieces induce the same heady sense of excitement, replete as they are with his trademarks: there’s the same illustrative line and mastery of colour, the same sheer genius of cut. “I’ve never dropped an idea or a concept completely,” Galliano says. “It becomes part of my identity, part of my signature.” There are bias-cut gowns in glorious jewel tones, ingenious technical tailoring, transparent layers of tulle falling like veils of memory and arcane historical gestures – including fiddle-dee-dee beribboned bonnets and cravats and bicorne hats straight out of Abel Gance’s 1927 epic , one of Galliano’s favourite films.

Galliano’s Zara work is imbued with his signature illustrative line and mastery of colour, the same genius of cut. “There are things that run in my veins,” he says. from left: Nhial, Riguelle, Tenney, Emeline Hoareau and Deng.

As Galliano cut, shifted and reformed these clothes, characters began to emerge – men dressed in cropped tailcoats and high-tugged collars, women in clinging draped dresses. The new, somehow, led back to the old: his silhouettes, exaggerated and arcane, resembled a band of aristocratic dandy rebels dating back to the French Revolution, known in their time as – “the Incredibles” (their female counterparts were , or “Marvellous Women”). Yet they have an innately personal Galliano history too. were the inspiration for Galliano’s 1984 Central Saint Martins graduation collection of the same name, which saw preening, make-up-slathered decadents modelling revelatory clothes that catapulted him onto a global fashion stage. It’s a theme and an era he returns to time and time again – foppish recusants decked out in frills and finery; rebellion through dress. “Vive la révolution.” (Galliano actually says this
to me.)

Collaborating with Zara, as it turns out, is a move entirely on-brand for the consistently confounding Galliano. Given that the king of couture has stormed all of high fashion’s bastilles during his four-decade (and counting) career, why wouldn’t he take to the high street? The new collection also highlights a duality at the core of Galliano’s work: while he seems to find his purest expression through the handwork of couture, his dream-making, like that behind old-school Hollywood epics, appeals to . For many, this Zara collection will be their initial encounter with a Galliano dress – one they could, perhaps, afford – out in the world. (Even the second-hand market for his earlier work is wild – in January a Galliano couture piece for Dior broke a world record, selling for €663,000; the Zara collection starts at £17.99.)

“It’s an honour to bring John’s magic to a broad audience for the first time,” says Ortega Pérez, while Galliano, for his part, says that the collaboration has “a much larger reach than I’ve had before – it’s huge”. He was also flabbergasted by the facilities of Inditex, specifically in terms of fabric sourcing and manufacture, which he calls “jaw-dropping”. And as the images in this story suggest, the technical proficiency this allowed spurred Galliano on to a truly full-throttle expression of his prodigious talents. “I had no intentions to dumb down,” he says.

Tenney (left) and Riguelle are a movable feast.

To be clear: this new collection is no mere aside or interregnum. In recounting the scope of his career, Galliano names the first 30 or so years – from Saint Martins through his Dior tenure – as act one and his decade in Margiela’s Tabi-toed shoes as act two. Re{form}, he says, begins act three. His contract with Zara spans two years, during which he will design a total of four collections.

When I ask him what he was looking for when setting out on this third act, Galliano’s answer is disarmingly simple.

“I wanted it to be fun,” he says – and Re{form}’s baseball-cap bonnets, its mismatched platforms, its topsy-turvy play with extraordinary clothes, certainly is. But it is also – undeniably, unmistakably – e.

In this story: hair, Eugene Souleiman; make-up, Aurore Gibrien; tailor, Simone Hoffmann; manicurist, Anatole Rainey.

Produced by Lotti Projects.