Every Piece and From Re{Form} Zara by John Galliano, Vol. 1

Zara released the first volume of its new Re {Form} Zara by John Galliano collection today and boy is it massive. And expensive. With many of the more standout pieces — the sheer dresses and coats — retailing for around $750 to $1000. Still, that’s significantly less than one would have paid for similar pieces from Galliano’s collections for Maison Margiela and Dior. And while these are not replicas of the work he created at those houses, they certainly share a very similar design language that fans of the couturier’s work will recognize, especially styled as they are in the accompanying campaign by Steven Meisel (with styling by Karl Templer, makeup by Pat McGrath, and hair by Guido Palau).

The collection touches just about every category among Zara’s extensive fashion offerings: from menswear and women’s wear to bags, shoes, gloves, hats, and the little styling brick-a-brac like scarves and stand alone collars that pull the looks together and give them that John Galliano je ne sais quoi.

When the collection was first announced in March, there was much speculation about exactly what form it would take. Talk of Galliano’s mandate (or choice) to rework pieces from the Zara archive — which one imagines must be about the size of the Library of Congress, given the amount of clothes they produce — rather than starting from scratch, lead some to wonder if this would turn out to be an exercise in upcycling, especially given that the EU had recently passed a law that effectively bans the destruction and trashing of unsold stock, of which Zara has literal tons (on top of tons on top of tons on top of tons). That actually could have been rather exciting. Bringing in a celebrated (if periodically disgraced) couturier to rework garments otherwise destined for the landfill.

But no. Instead, Galliano merely took inspiration from Zara’s past stock, using the design language he found there and running it through his own very particular filter to produce entirely new clothes out of entirely new materials. Galliano “employs the techniques of cutting-edge couture – physical hacking, digital hacking, shrinking, magnifying, filtering, swatching, splicing – to evoke new expressions imbued with the silhouettes and attitudes of Les Incroyables and Les Merveilleuses for modern-day posturing,” said Zara in their release for the collection.

“Each piece I started to play with took on its own character,” said Galliano of his process creating the collection. “When you take something out of context and try it on different fabrics, you begin to subvert it. It becomes a little newer, but in a subtle way. You have to look twice sometimes. It’s a dialogue… to me, Re{form} Zara means working in a similar way that digital artists do, or DJs when they sample music. It’s kind of the grammar of today. That’s how I see it with cloth.”

Check out the full collection below. And boy is there a lot of it!