The Galliano Zara Re{form} collection arrived on 1 October 2026, and it asks a question that most designer-retailer projects are too polite to raise: what if the garment already in the shop were simply the starting point? Vol. 1 09/2026, the first instalment of what is billed as a two-year creative partnership, went on sale at 10am CEST, according to The Glam and Glitter, in Zara flagship stores in Madrid and London and on Zara‘s website.
It marks John Galliano’s first major project since his departure from Maison Margiela in 2024. The terms of engagement are unusual: rather than designing a capsule from scratch, Galliano takes existing Zara garments and cuts, enlarges, shrinks, splices and distorts them. A shirt becomes a coat. Trousers are sculpted into breeches. A lace dress is reduced to a jabot. Layers are stacked to conjure the illusion of outerwear. The method is recognisably his, take something familiar, dismantle it, and return it to the world as something splendidly strange.
Les Incroyables, Revisited
Out of that process come two figures: Les Incroyables and Les Merveilleuses, the rebellious dandies and divas of post-Revolutionary France. They are not new to Galliano’s vocabulary. They headlined his 1984 Central Saint Martins graduate collection, the one Browns bought in full and that helped launch his career. Forty years on, they reappear alongside the polished codes of the gardening wardrobe and the smoky glamour of film noir, each chapter given its own palette: the gentleman’s black, navy, burgundy and beige punctuated by red; the horticultural khakis, mints and ochres; and finally the orchid pink, turquoise and acid green of noir.
Each transformation within the collection carries its own name. The Flix layers garments to suggest a coat, using an almost invisible net dress with faux-fur trims so the wearer can build their own silhouette. The Shi/ft turns one garment into another entirely: a Zara shirt graded up three times its original size, then foil-printed to resemble leather while retaining the lightness of poplin. Deep Pockets reworks a jacket’s pocket placement to shift its posture, lending the tailoring a more gestural, less constructed attitude. Elsewhere, the Floating Bra, Plume Zoom and La Mouche Volant, an embroidered swarm of 18th-century flies appearing to lift from the surfaces of dresses and caps, complete the picture.
The accessories follow the same logic. Tri-Chic, a reversible sack bag with a chain strap that can be worn three ways, reimagines the bin liner as a handbag, its name a nod to French recycling. Archival Zara shoes are stretched into elongated winklepickers and sculpted T-bar heels. Hats created with milliner Stephen Jones transform familiar silhouettes into eccentric fisherman’s hats crumpled into Napoleonic bicornes, acquiring beaked, bonnet-like visors as they go. Photography throughout is by Steven Meisel.
The Galliano Zara Re{form} Collection in Context
There is an easy cynicism available whenever a designer of Galliano’s stature turns toward a mass-market retailer, and Re{form} is, to its credit, aware of it. This is not a name stamped onto a capsule. It is an exercise in reconstruction, treating the archive as raw material and applying couture technique to the everyday wardrobe. In that sense, it is entirely consistent with the last decade of Galliano’s practice: reworking existing garments, questioning what a garment is before it becomes what it appears to be.
The broader context is one of complicated rehabilitation. The New York Times has reported that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s plans for a 2027 Galliano retrospective at the Costume Institute were postponed following a backlash. Re{form}, then, arrives not as a triumphant return but as a more provisional one: a two-year partnership with a retailer whose reach is genuinely global, structured around reconstruction rather than spectacle.
For those curious about price, The Glam and Glitter reports that US prices range from $29.99 to $999.99, which places the collection in an unusual position: accessible at the low end by any measure, while the upper range suggests pieces that require more considered commitment. Vol. 1 is available now in flagship stores and online, with Vol. 2 still to come within the partnership’s two-year frame.
