Dress

John Galliano's conflations of diverse cultures and historic periods are the most fevered and unexpected of any contemporary designer. In this garment, from his ready-to-wear collection at Christian Dior, Galliano appears to cite the late 1920s, when the knee-baring chemise was transitioning into the bias cut languor of the 1930s. In addition, he seems to have reprised the panniered, or side-hooped, shapes of the period's robes de style and the handkerchief hems favored for evening dresses of the time. In his use of silk tulle, a weightless textile of great elasticity, Galliano suggests the phenomenon of the planarity of the 1920s silhouette beginning to give way to more body-cleaving styles. The designer draped the cloth with the angled seaming characteristic of bias cuts and then applied shaped platelets of leather in a crocodile-like pattern to convey the impression of reptilian skins cobbled together. In its Amazonian exoticism and Jazz Age glamour, the dress might have costumed Josephine Baker.