But over lunch recently, Galliano said: "That was me. I decided to do that. Very odd to see a girl walking down the runway with a bag, I agree. But, at the same time, I knew that a certain girl with a certain shaped bag would get the image out there." And of course, increasingly the image is the message.
"It's also a question of time as well," he said. "Gone are the days of the great Balenciaga and M. Dior, when you had six months to create a line, a silhouette. That's what I try to do in haute couture. But the timing is very different today."
Does he feel he has time to be creative? "It's programmed," he said. "I mean, you can't come into the studio one day and say, `I'm really feeling this design."' He laughed. "It's more programmed than that. No, it doesn't bother me. I need it."
At almost every turn in his 10 years at Dior, beginning with the Matrix show, which included clothes that had been taken apart and put together backward or upside down, Galliano has demonstrated a greater ability to change than his audience. I know: in a review of the Matrix show, I wrote, "Even if there was something believably modern here, the sort of world Galliano was envisioning hardly needs haute couture."
I took the clients' side. Wrong move. In haute couture, at least as it's practiced by Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld, you trust the designer. The modernity of Galliano's torn-apart approach was eventually borne out in the imitations.
In the late 1980s, in a small Italian magazine called Westuff, Galliano said he considered himself part of the establishment. Given his circumstances at the time -- near poverty, no regular source of financing and serious amounts of clubbing -- this may have been a case of telling a journalist what he wanted to hear. Yet despite his working-class upbringing and the outlaw poses, Galliano's understanding of fashion and business does lie with the establishment.
Reminded of the article, he said: "I was a baby. How bold of me to say I want to be an international designer and have a house in Paris! But there you go. There's no point fighting it. Embrace it. Work within it, and then do things."
He acknowledged the front-row complaints that Dior has gone too commercial without addressing them. "Um, can it ever be too commercial?" he said. "I think what we're doing is right for the time. I don't want Dior to rest as a niche brand."
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