"London is so proud to host this momentous event" is the gist of some of the noise in the run-up to Galliano's first women's couture show for the erstwhile minimalist Maison Martin Margiela label this week.
Hmm. As Vanessa Friedman, the fashion critic for The New York Times, noted last week, the decision to show in London at the tail end of a weekend of men's shows, instead of during Paris couture week later this month, suggests that the designer is wary of the reaction a catwalk show might provoke in France, where they still haven't forgiven him for the anti-Semitic, anti-Asian outbursts in a Paris bar that caused him to lose his job at Dior in 2011. Or maybe his new employer, Renzo Rosso, who owns Martin Margiela, is. My guess is that most of London is oblivious to this forthcoming event.
Hyperbole is what the fashion world does well, of course, but for the record, the fashion world is not as one on this. For every breathless tweet thanking God for Galliano's return, there is plenty of private disquiet about the insensitive tenor of some of the hype surrounding Monday's show.
Few argue that Galliano doesn't deserve a second chance. No one disputes that he's a very big talent. Many of us fell in love with fashion through his earliest shows. My first major spend - in instalments - was on a Galliano Prince of Wales checked wool pencil skirt with a high waistband appliqued with roses. That's why the past four years have been so painful for those who can't separate fashion from its wider context, especially when that context is increasingly jittery. If Galliano had been a two-bit designer no one cared about, this would probably all have been long forgotten - although in today's febrile climate, and in the light of the terrible events this past week in Paris, perhaps not.
The issue is partly one of tone. Gush is often the default setting for fashion-speak, but gush won't help his re-entry into the world at large - it only makes fashion look vacuous. Leaked reports that post-rehab, he visited a synagogue (as if this were some arcane, anthropological exercise) are not helpful, either. Nor are the overblown descriptions of what this show symbolises for London, the world, and humanity.
