The John Galliano Newspaper Bomber: Faux Fur and the Front Page

A bomber jacket is a practical garment, short, warm and easy to move in. John Galliano made this one in faux fur and lined it with the motif most closely associated with his own label: a printed newspaper, its columns and headlines spread across the cloth. The outside is soft and plain; the inside reads like a front page.

From Gibraltar to Paris

Galliano was born in Gibraltar in 1960 and trained at Central Saint Martins in London, where his graduation collection of 1984, Les Incroyables, drew on the dress of post-revolutionary France. He moved his business to Paris in the early 1990s, became creative director of Givenchy in 1995, and was appointed to Christian Dior in 1996, where he remained until 2011. Alongside his work for Dior, he continued to design under his own name.

A print with a history

Printed newspaper on clothing has a long history in fashion. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a work by Elsa Schiaparelli from 1935 printed with press clippings about the designer herself, one of the best-known earlier uses of the idea. Schiaparelli turned her own coverage into a pattern, so that the garment both carried and commented on her fame.

Galliano returned to the idea at Dior. Reports of his autumn–winter 2000 work for the house describe garments printed with a fictional newspaper, the "Christian Dior Daily", and the motif became widely known. Accounts differ on whether it first appeared on the couture or the ready-to-wear runway, and we have not settled that question. What is clear is that newspaper print became one of the signatures of Galliano's own label, often under the name "Gazette", appearing on scarves, shirts, swimwear and linings through the 2000s.

The object

The Archivary describes the jacket as a John Galliano faux fur bomber with the designer's newspaper print inside, in a size Small, equivalent to an Italian 40 or a British 8. Its condition is recorded as very good. The listing does not identify a season.

On this jacket the print is used as a lining, with a plain faux fur exterior: it is a detail revealed when the jacket is opened or moved, rather than an all-over surface. Faux fur also suits the bomber's shape, giving volume to a short, cropped jacket without the weight of real fur.

News as ornament

A newspaper print turns words into pattern. At a distance it reads as texture, a grey or coloured field of lines; close to, headlines and fragments of text become legible. That double reading, between decoration and message, is part of what made the motif attractive to Schiaparelli and to Galliano, both designers interested in fashion's relationship with its own publicity.