PARIS, February 28, 2006 – Kerrang! The Christian Dior woman has turned into a goth-metal rock chick, all black bandana, major shades, fur-sprouting distressed leathers and stompin' medieval biker boots. With Pat Benatar and Bon Jovi on the soundtrack, and a front row that included Kate Hudson and Black Crowes hubby Chris Robinson, John Galliano turned the ultra-establishment Grand Palais de Paris into a fashion-rock stadium for the night. (Well, 20 minutes of it).

For anyone with an eye for recent history, this was Galliano up to familiar tricks. The identically wigged, long-haired rocker women on the runway were—stylistically at least—slightly more contemporary sisters to the blood-spattered nineteenth-century zealots who appeared in Dior's French Revolutionary haute couture show for spring. This fall collection made the trickle-down effect from fantasy to nuts-and-bolts ready-to-wear more understandable than in seasons past. Galliano's voluminous, floor-sweeping coats with huge, shaggy goat-hair tufts escaping from their seams, and his neat jackets, decorated with vertical strips of fur, will translate into plenty of sellable pieces for the boutiques of the world to carry.

More surprisingly, but just as cleverly, Galliano also slipped in references to Christian Dior's 1947 New Look jacket—here in a peplumed shape, or covered with tulle in the front. Those suits, with their artfully tattered and embroidered surfaces and second-skin pencil skirts, have a certain delicacy that is guaranteed to register with the more hyper-feminine Dior customer Galliano knows so well. Oddly enough, they also made a connection with the eighties power suit; a look that is preoccupying the young—and the not-so-young—on Planet Fashion this season.

– Sarah Mower