The John Galliano Collector That Wears Gloves To Handle His Clothing | Vogue

[Music] I was thinking of that kind of Murray condo thing of you know does it spark joy and everything Sparks Joy which is kind of a disaster in terms of storage solutions and in terms of my financial State I think my collection is around 300 pieces [Music] oh I'm Alexander Fury and I'm devoted to collecting the work of John Galliano I first started collecting John Galliano pieces when I was a teenager I didn't conceive of it as a collection at that point in time it was just I I was a kid that was completely besotted with the work that he was creating I can remember the first time I saw a John Galliano dress it was in a magazine and it was a magazine that my mother owned it was a picture of Carla Bruni she's wearing a long black and white dress with a coat and she was stood on the rooftops of a building and it was snowing and this just didn't look like anything else that I'd ever seen before I wanted to know more about it and that was really sort of the the Gateway for my fascination with with fashion welcome to my archive room this is where I keep the majority of my Galliano collection and I would estimate there's around two to three hundred pieces in here okay so I'm gonna put on white cotton curators gloves which seem a bit deranged um out of context but it's to protect everything from acids from my hands and also honestly because I have white things and I have a propensity to get dirt on any spots of white in Any Garment feasible so that's why I wear these the difficulty in finding anything in here is that there is no system there is no logic to the way that I store all these things it's very kind of impulsive and I often get distracted by finding things that are amazing that I forgot I had um right okay but then you know when you do find the thing you've been searching for it's like finding kind of hidden treasure so this is from John galliano's Autumn winter 2000 collection for Christian Dior Fly Girls which is a favorite of mine it's entirely sequined silk tie-dye to look like Denim and it's just an extraordinary piece it's another of those pieces where you can't quite believe it was physically made but I'm very lucky that it ended up with me I would say the collection has completely outgrown my home and what I need to do is be less Covetous and less focused on having it within Arm's Reach I have this issue with quite clothing specific separation anxiety the pieces I collect are women's wear um and they're quite extreme women's wear they're not kind of polite coats with a little bit of a bus start you know they're ball gowns their biased evening dresses their skirt suits in sort of shocking pink these aren't pieces that I'm buying to wear it's absolutely an obsession I don't think obsessions are necessarily bad things I always think I could be doing much worse things with my time and with my money than this and I do think it's about caring for things and that it's it's weird when you talk about kind of inanimate objects but you know clothes are delicate things they can be destroyed by so many memes you can leave them and they can be eaten by moths they can get wet they can get stained they can be mistreated they can be torn they need to be kind of cared for and cherished these are one of the first Galliano pieces I ever bought myself their Dior logo rings from Autumn winter 2000 I spent pretty much all of my money on when I was a distorted 16 year old a lot of people have kind of asked me about where this passion comes from why I feel such kind of love for what John Galliano does and increasingly I've come to the realization that it's the same as teenage boys being basalted with a particular musician or guys who are incredibly passionate about a football team or a soccer team you know for me my sport is fashion and my team is Galliano I made the right decision in buying them because now they're ferociously difficult to get hold of so I'm very happy I got these it is this kind of you know teenage Obsession this sort of nose to the glass wanting to be part of this world idolizing somebody falling in love with everything they're creating I also think kind of for a kid who was different growing up in the north of England in the middle of the countryside where you had to special order Vogue to be able to to get it at the kind of local Corner Shop it was amazing that there was this kind of dream of this other world there was this dream of I don't want to say something better but certainly something different when I discovered galliano's work it was like oh these are people that kind of you know they get what I'm about [Music] this is a note from John he does know that I am an admirer and that I collect his work he actually knows firsthand because one of I would say the earliest pieces I collected was and certainly one of the most important pieces I have is a coat from Autumn winter 1996. it's actually a cult that John wore for a portrait by Paula reversely taken that year and it was in the show and I bought it on eBay there was a fierce bidding war between me and one other bidder um until about kind of three in the morning and I was the person that finally won it and I subsequently found out that the other bidder on the item was John um which he told me himself and I don't know if he thought I was going to give him the coat but I I'm not going to give him the coat this is the codes it's really extraordinary I think it's the greatest fashion designer in the world and I think these are the greatest clothes in the world every piece has a story every piece has been hunted out somewhere there's kind of a voyage of Discovery to find everything and it's very rare you buy one outfit from the same people you know I have a newsprint jacket that fastens with safety pins I bought the newspaper jacket from one person and I bought each of the safety pins from two other people so as well as collecting Galliano clothes I'm lucky enough that I've been able to collect a bunch of his invitations from the 1990s and just as scaliano's fashion shows weren't like other fashion shows his invitations weren't like other invitations there were all kinds of sort of Fantastical objects and here's just a few of them um this one is quite special this is from the spring summer 1997. John Galliano show which is kind of colloquially known as the circus collection so Matryoshka doll with a charm bracelet on the inside every kind of invite was the sort of first uh Glimpse at the sort of Miz on sand at the sort of fantasy he was imagining for each season so the invite for spring summer 1996 is a ballet slipper with a scroll of Music attached this was a show that took place in the Teatro de champs-elysees in Paris and famously had Shalom Harlow performing pirouettes at the end I'm very well aware not everyone can afford these clothes I couldn't afford these clothes when I was a kid but I could look at the pictures and I could fall in love with the pictures and those could make me dream and want to be part of this and that's why I think fashion is elitist but it's also incredibly egalitarian because anyone can look at pictures of these clothes and can fall in love with them and can dream about them a lot of people ask me what I would save if there was a fire in this room and the answer is probably this dress here um it's the dress that was worn by Carla Bruni not the actual dress unfortunately but there were only five ever made you can see here there's just one seam that holds the entire hem together and all the fit seems all the darts everything is kind of lost into the image of this flower I think a lot of the times not just in fashion but in lots of cases you know when you go and visit an amazing Monument or you meet your hero they don't live up to the expectations that you had in your head and the thing that's for me really wonderful about Galliano is everything I've got hold of is even better in real life then I imagined it was gonna be [Music] a lot of people ask me what the ultimate goal is what the kind of aim is you know am I am I going to do an exhibition am I going to donate it all to a museum am I going to sell it all as a kind of spurious justification to myself there is this sense of oh well I bought this for x amount and now it's worth y amount and it's incredibly valuable and I've spent a lot of money on it but it is worth far more than I've spent on it and obviously to me it's completely Priceless and I don't think I could ever sell it and I don't know what the ultimate goal is that's something that's slightly frightening as well as sort of exciting I'm like well the ultimate goal is to own everything from every show but then what do I do with it do I restage the show I often quote The Duchess of Windsor she once said the possession of beautiful things is thrilling to me and I see that in this it's just this idea of getting something and just being like wow isn't this isn't this great [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: Vogue

Views: 472,188

Keywords: alexander fury, big clothing collection, clothes collection, clothing collection, clothing collection videos, devoted, devoted vogue john galliano, dior, dior collection, dior diamonds, expensive collection, john galliano, john galliano clothing, john galliano collection, john galliano designer, john galliano dior, large clothing collection, runway collection, vogue, vogue clothing, vogue clothing collection, vogue clothing collection videos, vogue collection, vogue devoted

Id: -e_sBi2pjug

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2022