John Galliano’s Reimaging of Ancient Egypt for Dior’s SS04 Collection

On a January Parisian day in 2004, the Seine was frozen, but inside the Dior tent, John Galliano was on fire - as per. What erupted on the runway wasn’t so much a fashion show as a fever-dream: an opulent, maximalist séance with the ghosts of Ancient Egypt, reanimated through Galliano’s unhinged yet hypnotic imagination.

Glitter and gold and a runway drenched in the shimmering illusion of pharaonic power, stretched through a distinctly early-millennium lens. It was decadent, disorienting, and gloriously impractical. This was not fashion for us mere mortals. This was Galliano in full spectacle mode: less designer, more high priest of pageantry.

For centuries, Egypt has been the west’s mirror of excess and enigma, a sumptuous lens for their hedonism. Think Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, reclining in poetic ruin; or Frank Ocean’s millennial siren collapsing under the weight of her own mythology. Galliano understood this allure implicitly. When he took an aerial tour of Egypt and he gazed down, he envisioned a catwalk etched into the sand, a mirage where couture replaced civilisation, and a haute couture mirage rising from the dust and ashes of one of the greatest civilisations of human history.

The show opened with the surreal kind of theatricality that only Galliano could conjure. Traditional Egyptian music gave way to Beyoncé’s Baby Boy, a sonic pivot that said everything: time is irrelevant, genre is a joke, and this is going to be fun. Like Frank Ocean’s Pyramids eight years later, Galliano melted millennia into minutes. History wasn’t just referenced. It was remixed.

Then came the collection. Like fashion’s theatrical messiah, Galliano conjured a court of walking goddesses: towering models encased in metallic peplum jackets and sarcophagus-tight skirts, dizzyingly high heels and two-foot-tall hair sculptures, their hips jutted forward, and backs arched in homage to the Penn and Avedon portraits that informed this grand pharaonic hallucination. The Bangles’ Walk Like an Egyptian thudded in the background, as if to wink and say, yes, we know exactly what we’re doing.

Erin O’Connor opened the show swathed in a Nefertiti-inspired headdress and a ribbed, hourglass sheath in striped molten gold fabric, cinched and flared into an origami explosion of sculptural folds around the hips and arms. Every look that followed was another monument: scarab-encrusted corsets, lotus-embroidered gowns framed by leopard print fur stoles. One model looked like a walking pyramid, her skirt plumed in feathers. Another wore a ballooning mirror-panelled dress like a disco meet deity. It was gaudy and it was glorious.

And then, subtly, strangely, it shifted. What began as baroque grandeur started to unravel. Literally. The dresses softened, liquefied. Jewel tones gave way to sleek silvers, white chiffon peeled off like ceremonial wrappings. Models morphed from queens into wraiths, mummified and modern. Until, the dresses finally returned to the pageantry and pomp of a more familiar Dior, and Galliano emerged in a tailored pinstripe suit like a devious fashion archaeologist surveying his fantastical dig site.

Monumental jewellery dripped from their bodies, so oversized it bordered on surrealism. Turquoise, lapis, coral, and gold earrings the size of eagle eggs. Faces masked in carved wood, crafted by milliner Stephen Jones, evoked gods like Anubis, Bast and Horus. Those without masks wore another kind of facade: gold-dusted lips, redrawn brows, thick kohl liner, Pat McGrath’s makeup mastery turning flesh into canvas.

But don’t mistake this for a gimmick. Yes, it was wild. Yes, it was bedazzled beyond belief. But beneath the rhinestones was a real sense of reverence. Not historical accuracy - Galliano couldn’t care less about that - but something more compelling: a cultural homage reimagined as couture hallucination.

One thing about Galliano: restraint has never been part of his design vocabulary. This is the man who once sent models down the runway waving dead mackerels at his graduate show. And at Dior Spring 2004, he was in peak form: unfiltered, unhinged, and utterly magnificent. Call it what you will (eclecticism, excess, ego with embroidery?) but thank the gods - and the hot air balloon ride over Egypt - that he never learned to play it safe.