Some things get under your skin and never leave. For me, it was a John Galliano show for Dior — Fall 2005 — where he collapsed the entire history of the house and the concept of death into a single collection. It was disturbing, sublime, and unlike anything fashion had produced before or since. I first encountered it while writing my thesis on fashion films, and it never let go. Eternal Spectres is what happened when I finally stopped resisting it.
The video didn't start with a story. It started with a stage — just the setting, nothing else — and from that empty space, every visual decision unfolded. The garments on screen are real pieces, carrying the same historical and symbolic weight they held on Galliano's original runway. Nothing was invented. Everything was reinterpreted.
Through a series of archetypal figures, the film maps out different relationships with death. There's the hunter, chasing tenderness — embodied by a deer — with the sole intent of destroying it. There's the nihilist, moving through the world as though death simply doesn't exist. And orbiting around them, a constellation of symbols: the death's-head moth, that silent messenger of the inevitable, among others.
Eternal Spectres isn't a recreation of Galliano's show. It's an echo. A conversation between his vision and mine — between obsession and tribute, between what he built on that runway and what it built inside me.
