2 min readZara is going couture—and it’s doing it with John Galliano.
This morning, the retail giant announced a two-year partnership with the former Dior and Margiela creative director, who was—like Zara—born in Spain. The company says the 65-year-old designer will “re-author the brand’s archives…deconstructing and reconfiguring them into new seasonal expressions and creations.” Translation? Galliano will climb into Zara’s warehouse of past creations, which span about 50 years, and remake some of its favorite pieces into new looks. They’ll begin hitting stores in September.
This sounds wild, but in a way, Galliano has been doing this all along. When he began at Dior in 1996, the London resident dug deep into the couture house’s storied archives and remixed Dior’s elegant silk dresses in acid pinks and parrot greens, then embroidered and cropped his famous Bar jackets so they could fit into ’90s raves. When he took over Maison Martin Margiela in 2014, Galliano riffed on the label’s famous mix of high-low glamour, cutting T-shirts from antique lace and remixing trashed trench coats into stunning, layered ballgowns.
John Galliano was one of the most revered designers in modern fashion until his infamous crash in 2011, when he hurled hateful comments at Jewish and Asian patrons of a Paris café and was caught on video. Swiftly dismissed from his post at Dior, Galliano quickly entered a rehabilitation program for drugs and alcohol and began a decade-long journey to make amends. A documentary in 2023 by Jewish-Scottish director Kevin Macdonald traced his process; whispers of a Met Gala retrospective of his work began circulating among fashion circles this year.
The Zara partnership marks Galliano’s next step in his fashion world reentry; it’s also arguably the most hotly anticipated high-low collaboration since Karl Lagerfeld announced his H&M partnership way back in 2004. A statement from Zara says “further details will come in due course.”