British designer John Galliano asks whodunit at Sherlock Holmes-inspired menswear show

Galliano asks whodunit with Holmes-inspired show

PARIS — Theatrical British designer John Galliano lived up to his reputation as a master showman on Friday with a Sherlock Holmes-themed fall-winter 2010-2011 menswear production that involved a gigantic magnifying glass, flame-throwers and laced-up London dandies in ladies’ corsets.

Galliano looked beyond the caricature cinematic Holmes to Conan Doyle’s brilliant but troubled investigator and martial arts expert with an opium habit.

Models in layers of swishing overcoats in heavy tweeds and fur-lined deerstalkers opened the show, followed by straight-laced Victorian gentlemen in bowler hats and razor-cut three piece suits. Some of those particular characters — modeled on Holmes in his Baker Street daywear — were laced tighter than others, as evidenced by the ladies corsets that peeked out from beneath their slim trousers in Prince-of-Wales checks.

Then came Holmes the martial arts enthusiast, his head shrouded in gauzy bandages and wearing jewel toned briefs and dragon printed satin boxing robes. Holmes the decadent frequenter of London’s opium dens came next, in bejeweled Chinese pajama pants and jackets in deep purple velvet.

Security guards refused to let the show’s latecomers crouch next to the elevated catwalk, and it eventually became clear why: Flame-throwers propelled massive flames several meters (years) into the air as the models took a final lap on the runway, sparking shocked squeals from the generally blase fashion crowd.

“It was a super spectacle,” model-turned-photograper Ellen Von Unwerth gushed after the display, which was held in a hollowed out former bank on Paris’ glitzy Place Vendome. “I loved the story, the roles the guys played, and how sexy they were.”