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 nonexecutive 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 fall 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 Vogue portfolio, which led to the designer achieving sufficient financial backing to stage what became his legendary all-black fall-winter show that same year. Galliano and his longtime partner, Alexis Roche, went to Spain for Meisel, 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.
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 over lunch 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 existent 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?”
