Torture Porn Couture

Backstage, John Galliano was wearing a worn-out leather jacket with a blurry mustachioed face painted on the back. He insisted it was Einstein, but it looked just like Edgar Allen Poe, which worked because Poe’s "The Masque of the Red Death" was as good a reference a point as any to launch a dissection of Galliano’s latest fashion delirium. That story’s depiction of a decadent society partying itself to death rang those odd sociopolitical bells that Galliano willfully gongs on a regular basis. He blithely quipped that his underwear licensees would be cheered by a middle passage of bruised, bloodied models in skimpy underthings, but there were those in the audience who saw echoes of Clive Barker's Hellraiser—or Abu Ghraib.