[light piano music]
- I was thinking of that kind of Marie Kondo thing of,
"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.
Hello Vogue, 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 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.
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 gateway
for my fascination 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 300 pieces in here.
Okay, so I'm gonna put on white cotton curator's gloves,
which seem a bit deranged 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 spot 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 of these things.
It's very kind of impulsive,
and I often get distracted by finding things
that are amazing that I forgot I had.
Ah right, okay.
But then, 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 dyed 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 white clothing specific
separation anxiety.
The pieces I collect are womenswear,
and they're quite extreme womenswear.
They're not kind of polite coats
with a little bit of a bust dart.
They're ball gowns, they're bias cut evening dresses,
they're 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 weird when you talk about
kind of inanimate objects,
but your clothes are delicate things.
They can be destroyed by so many means.
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.
They're Dior logo rings from Autumn/Winter 2000.
I spent pretty much all of my money on
when I was a besotted 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 besotted
with a particular musician
or guys who are incredibly passionate
about a football team or a soccer team.
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 ahold of,
so I'm very happy I got these.
It is this kind of 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 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 wanna say something better,
but certainly something different.
When I discovered Galliano's work, it was like,
oh, these are people that kind of, they get what I'm about.
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 coat that John wore
for a portrait by Paolo Roversi 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,
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,
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 gonna give him the coat.
This is the coat.
It's really extraordinary.
I think he's the greatest fashion designer in the world.
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.
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 Galliano's fashion shows
weren't like other fashion shows,
these invitations weren't like other invitations.
There are all kinds of sort of fantastical objects,
and here's just a few of them.
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.
It's a Matryoshka doll with a charm bracelet on the inside.
Every kind of invite was the sort of first glimpse
at the sort of mise en scene, 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 [speaking French] in Paris,
and famously had Shalom Harlow
performed 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.
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 seams, 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, 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
than I imagined it was gonna be.
A lot of people ask me what the ultimate goal is,
what the kind of aim is.
Am I gonna do an exhibition?
Am I gonna 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?
[light piano music]