Unfinished, Yet Complete: Galliano’s Departure from Margiela

In fashion, exits are rarely simple. John Galliano’s departure from Dior in 2011 was a reckoning, one that left the industry splintered between condemnation and reluctant admiration. His latest exit, from Maison Margiela, is quieter but no less consequential. If Dior’s chapter closed in scandal, Margiela’s closes in exhaustion.

Galliano’s arrival at Margiela in 2014 seemed improbable at best. The house was known for its intellectual detachment, its stark anonymity; a counterpoint to Galliano’s theatrical, emotional excess. If his appointment raised eyebrows, it wasn’t just because of his past but because Margiela itself seemed antithetical to his creative instincts. 

He wasn’t a fit, and that was the point.

Over nearly a decade, Galliano redefined Margiela without dismantling it. He embraced the house’s foundational codes—deconstruction, transformation—but brought them to life in ways that felt raw and immediate. A trench coat wasn’t only reconstructed but magnified, seams and scaffolding exaggerated into centrepieces ; a shoe intentionally unfinished was less a provocation than a reflection of process itself. Margiela had always favoured the cerebral but Galliano introduced emotion, sometimes messy, but always deliberate.

Galliano’s departure doesn’t come as a shock. The reasons cited echo familiar challenges: creative fatigue, the relentless pace of fashion, the demands of staying relevant in an industry that now measures success in likes and reposts. Margiela’s ethos of ‘craft over convenience, permanence over disposability’ sits uneasily in a landscape defined by immediacy. Galliano’s work, so rooted in time and imperfection, was always at odds with this speed.

For all its rewards, fashion offers little grace for those who need to pause. Galliano, whose work thrives on the tension between collapse and creation, has always walked a fine line. At Margiela, that tension became both his signature and his challenge. The collections often felt intentionally unfinished, as though they acknowledged their own limits. But the industry itself has little patience for such limits, even when they’re part of the point.

Margiela today is a different house than it was in 2014, thanks in no small part to Galliano. His tenure brought the brand back to the centre of the conversation; not through flash or gimmick but by reframing its codes for a generation that hadn’t grown up with them. The Artisanal collections became a showcase for rethinking what couture could be, stripping away pretense while embracing experimentation. Galliano made luxury tactile and unpredictable, revealing not just the process but the humanity within it.

His tenure encouraged a new audience to engage with Margiela on their own terms. For a generation raised on aesthetics over formality, his approach—Equal parts intellectual and theatrical—offered entry points that didn’t exist before. Galliano bridged the house’s archive with a sense of now, creating pieces that felt as much about questioning conventions as wearing them.

With his departure, the question is not about Margiela’s survival but its direction. The house remains capable, yet who takes the helm will determine whether Margiela can continue to challenge assumptions or whether it will settle into safer, less urgent territory.

Galliano’s Margiela resists summary; his collections didn’t tie themselves up neatly, nor did they try to, instead, they left room for interpretation, for imperfection, for contradiction. His departure does the same.