If you’re a billionaire like Lauren Sánchez Bezos, you can hire a stylist or vintage expert to source John Galliano’s best nineties designs. Such as the 1995 black dress she wore to the Vanity Fair Oscars party Sunday night. Something “archival” — rare, special — that requires money to procure and no one else is likely to have. If your net worth is merely average and your clothes are bought at stores rather than “sourced” by professionals, you’ll soon be able to own a piece of something he may not have outright designed but at least “re-author[ed]”

On Tuesday, Zara announced a “creative partnership” with John Galliano beginning in September that will span two years. From the press release:

If one of fashion’s geniuses digging into the archive of a fast-fashion brand strikes you as sad or diminishing of a legacy of work many deem museum-worthy, I get it. There is something sort of depressing about the image of one of history’s great couturiers, now 65 years old, slinking off into the sunset of his professional years to rifle through bins of old Zara clothes in order to “reconfigure them into new seasonal expressions.” Galliano’s last couture collection for Margiela in 2024 and his designs on the Met Gala red carpet that same year left many in awe of his artistry. We haven’t heard much from him since, but we knew he wasn’t done designing. And now, here’s the big move: Zara.

This is such a good job for Galliano. It probably works in his favor even more than another luxury appointment. In all likelihood, he’s being paid quite handsomely for two years of “re-authoring” past Zara seasons. And working for a brand as mass as Zara sends a pretty powerful signal to the world that, Hey, Galliano did some bad stuff, but he’s okay now! He made clothes for rich people that the new American Oligarchy still want to wear — now he can make clothes for everyone else. Don’t you want to wear them, too?

Two years ago, rumors circulated about Galliano going to a big luxury house like Givenchy or Balenciaga. I wondered at the time if the industry really needed to give him another big appointment. His was fired from Dior in 2011 after his drunken antisemitic and racist tirades, captured on video, became public. (“I love Hitler” was one of the deeply troubling quotes from those incidents.) Galliano’s rehabilitation included a major job at Margiela that ended up working out quite well. He also appeared in the documentary High & Low: John Galliano in which he addressed these drunken tirades. He’s said he doesn’t remember saying those racist and antisemitic things. He’s talked about being an addict.

My predominant takeaway from the film was that he didn’t seem all that sorry. But he never needed to be in order for the industry to forgive him. Fashion has always liked his work, and that is important, but he’s not just someone with above-average creative output. He’s a myth, an icon — the way Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld are myths and icons. Fashion loves these eccentric, unknowable characters who confer marketable prestige on anything in their air space. These people are generally rebellious workaholics who have given their lives and souls to fashion, and our fascination with them overrides their worst public moments. Because they’ve always tested the culture’s tolerance, it may be easier for people to forgive their shocking behavior — their appeal was always in the way they created on a knife’s edge of acceptability, molding the global idea of “taste” in the process.

I have been told the idea of the Met’s Costume Institute doing a Galliano exhibition is still on the table. By many accounts, Anna Wintour regards him as one of the greatest designers ever. This Zara job is only going to help normalize him in the culture and push that exhibition closer to reality (according The Cut’s earlier reporting by Chantal Fernandez and mine more recently for Back Row, museum officials were not on board with the idea).

It’s easy to see how this Zara partnership will play out. We received almost no information about it today, so the brand can drip drip drip little bits of news and images to tease it here and there before September. The clothes will surely be released in highly limited drops. Lines will snake around the block at Zaras worldwide as kids too young to remember the events of 2011 and fashion diehards eager to forget them rush to buy it. (You know every single brand that’s ever made so much as a sock has had such line envy after Chanelmania over the weekend.)

As Shein struggles to maintain dominance owing to tax laws in the U.S., it’s a great time for Zara to remind middle-class shoppers who can no longer afford aspirational luxury goods that they can find those goods on their racks. Many are pointing out that the idea of a big designer reworking Zara’s old stuff is laughable since so much of it is knocked off by designers like, well, Galliano. Again, having Galliano is only going to help legitimize Zara as an actual captial-F Fashion brand.

While the risk of a global behemoth like Zara working with Galliano probably diminishes by the day, it’s still there. I spoke to a Very Important Client a few days ago who said she spends $100,000 a year at Chanel but is less inclined to shop there with the new Blazy direction. She told me she stopped shopping at Dior around the time Galliano appeared at Jonathan Anderson’s couture show in January, which payed homage to him. “That's lovely that [Anderson] liked his stuff, but that bothered me a lot,” she said. “Do we really have to bring him back?”