Dressing for the occasion
IT’S THE PANDEMIC phrase repeated over and over these days: we’re in a war, we’re fighting a war. It may not be a war that’s raining down bombs and bullets, but there are strangely similar parallels to the last great conflagration of the second world war: a lethal enemy is being fought on the home front as we shelter, in families, in communities, by heroes and heroines on the front lines in hospitals and care homes. And meanwhile, it’s precisely the World War II generation – our grandmothers and great-grandmothers who lived through it – who we’re all being called upon to protect. As the 1940s speak to current times with a startling new relevance, what that era has to teach us is suddenly a fascinatingly useful area to explore.
The events of the past months now shine the strangest light on the meaning of John Galliano’s Maison Margiela spring/summer ’20 collection, which he dedicated to the public spirit and heroic values of women and men in World War II. Nurses’ uniforms; army, navy and air force uniforms; images of female French resistance fighters and undercover agents – it was all there. There’s no way that Galliano, even with his Zeitgeist-attuned antennae, could have known about the coming pandemic. Nevertheless, he’d hit on his inspiration for a very good
