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Lot Essay
When John Galliano presented Fallen Angels in 1986 he announced not merely a designer, but a dramatist of fabric and form. Among its most celebrated pieces, the so-called scissor-pleat dress with pouched breast pocket embodies the charged romanticism and sculptural daring that would come to define Galliano’s career.
The collection took its title from Milton’s Paradise Lost and from Galliano’s fascination with decay, desire, and the tension between ruin and resurrection. His heroines—figures of fallen grandeur—appeared in bias-cut silks, distressed satins, and garments that seemed to hover between historical costume and contemporary gesture. The effect was sensual yet fragile, the raw edges and slashed seams suggesting both the violence of creation and the poetry of imperfection.
In 1986, London fashion was emerging from the post-punk underground; Galliano’s work offered a new kind of romantic spectacle that stood apart from the city’s prevailing austerity. His understanding of historical silhouette—drawn from the eighteenth-century corset and the sinuous lines of 1930s couture—merged with a cinematic sense of storytelling. In the scissor-pleat dress, these influences coalesced: its construction defied the stiffness of tailoring, embracing the fluid logic of the body. To cut directly into the fabric, to let seams fall open and drape into seemingly chance folds, was an act of confidence and instinct.
Galliano’s importance to British fashion lies in his synthesis of craftsmanship and narrative theatre. He restored a sense of romance to a decade dominated by surface and commerce, infusing it with erudition and emotional charge. Fallen Angels announced that fashion could be history rewritten through the body—a costume for characters of the designer’s own invention. The creator has been at the centre of world fashion ever since leaving Central St Martins and when he took his vision to Paris and made Dior and their clients take note. He was part of the influx of British designers that tried to break the mould of Paris Haute Couture and he remained the grit in the oyster in his time at Margiela.
As such, the scissor-pleat dress endures as a symbol of Galliano’s early genius: a garment that turns fragility into structure and passion into form. It presaged the lyrical extravagance that would later electrify Paris, while remaining rooted in the creative freedom and daring that defined London in the 1980s.
The collection took its title from Milton’s Paradise Lost and from Galliano’s fascination with decay, desire, and the tension between ruin and resurrection. His heroines—figures of fallen grandeur—appeared in bias-cut silks, distressed satins, and garments that seemed to hover between historical costume and contemporary gesture. The effect was sensual yet fragile, the raw edges and slashed seams suggesting both the violence of creation and the poetry of imperfection.
In 1986, London fashion was emerging from the post-punk underground; Galliano’s work offered a new kind of romantic spectacle that stood apart from the city’s prevailing austerity. His understanding of historical silhouette—drawn from the eighteenth-century corset and the sinuous lines of 1930s couture—merged with a cinematic sense of storytelling. In the scissor-pleat dress, these influences coalesced: its construction defied the stiffness of tailoring, embracing the fluid logic of the body. To cut directly into the fabric, to let seams fall open and drape into seemingly chance folds, was an act of confidence and instinct.
Galliano’s importance to British fashion lies in his synthesis of craftsmanship and narrative theatre. He restored a sense of romance to a decade dominated by surface and commerce, infusing it with erudition and emotional charge. Fallen Angels announced that fashion could be history rewritten through the body—a costume for characters of the designer’s own invention. The creator has been at the centre of world fashion ever since leaving Central St Martins and when he took his vision to Paris and made Dior and their clients take note. He was part of the influx of British designers that tried to break the mould of Paris Haute Couture and he remained the grit in the oyster in his time at Margiela.
As such, the scissor-pleat dress endures as a symbol of Galliano’s early genius: a garment that turns fragility into structure and passion into form. It presaged the lyrical extravagance that would later electrify Paris, while remaining rooted in the creative freedom and daring that defined London in the 1980s.