The last time John Galliano and Gwendoline Christie were in the same room together was in January.

It was less a “room” and more a squalid hinterland beneath the Pont d’Alexandre III in Paris, where Galliano staged his spring/summer 2024 collection for Maison Margiela Artisanal. Fugitives, pickpockets and streetwalkers stumbled around street lamps like broken puppets bewitched with life.

It was a world of rib-crunching corsets and moth-eaten mirkins, at the centre of which was Christie in a Latex gown with extreme pannier hips and the face of an embalmed 18th-century madam. “With great compassion and love you were able to see into the heart of me,” Christie told Galliano at this year’s Forces of Fashion London.

“And I’m not sure I’ve ever been treated so beautifully and so celebratory in my entire life.” This afternoon’s conversation was a homecoming for Galliano and Christie.

The designer studied at Central Saint Martins between 1979 and 1984 – and in some ways never left since his image has been reproduced in an altarpiece that hangs in the corridors – while Christie graduated in 2005 from Drama Centre London, which is situated on the same grounds as the new CSM building.

“Student life was very particular at that time,” Galliano remembers. “The beautiful, exotic creatures who’d hang at the Blitz club, I had never met people who had spoken my language like that.

“Stephen Linard, Kim Bowen, Steve Strange, Stephen Jones, Princess Julia. It was electrifying.” A word to Central Saint Martins’s current fashion students: “I was just sitting outside, watching you guys turning up on your bikes, and pondering.

“I got quite emotional because I know how it feels. Don’t listen to anyone. God is inside you. You’re the ones that made this happen. Don’t have any doubt. Realise your dream.”

The legend of Galliano was retold with exacting detail: his Les Incroyables graduate proposal, the debut collection he devised on a shoestring budget in 1994 at São Schlumberger’s Left Bank hôtel particulier; his arrival at Givenchy in 1995 and his eventual takeover of Dior in 1996. But it was his spring/summer 2011 collection that the designer perhaps holds closest.

“That pushed me over the edge,” he says. “You might not be able to tell, but those garments were sometimes made up of 50 layers of tulle.

“I was inspired by René Gruau, who illustrated Mr Dior’s work at the time, and in particular the unfinished line of his brushstrokes. The other inspiration was the chiaroscuro lighting of Mr [Irving] Penn.

“Unfinished symphonies, that was the concept, and it was a lot of work.” The designer credits hairstylist Orlando Pita, make-up artist Pat McGrath and milliner Stephen Jones – among many other lifelong collaborators – with the remarkable visions he brought to life.

Galliano continues to work with that “village” at Maison Margiela, which started in 2014 with a home visit from Martin himself. “I wasn’t quite sure whether I could do the job,” he says.

“And then I had the great honour of meeting Martin for tea. I got to understand what was going on inside his head. His feelings, his loves, his hates.

“How difficult he found menswear or how he would’ve loved to have done more historical things, but I had cornered the market on history. I can’t tell you how incredible that was. I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to give this a try.” That he did.

Recalling her first-hand experience of being a “muse” – Galliano refers to his models as “muses” – Christie says: “I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of research that had gone into your most recent Artisanal collection.

“And I was very aware that this would be a masterful moment, a moment from a great artist, who is master of his craft, who has an unbridled, extraordinary, transcendental imagination, brought into a couture show at a time when what we didn’t know we needed was a dream.” The future of the fashion show, Galliano says, is “very positive”.

“I love all the new platforms we can play on, and invite people to share their art, their drawings, their music, their community through. The kids that reacted to the last show, who went to the venue afterwards and put on a trench back to front and be Leon or shove cushions up their skirt to look like Lulu.

“I mean, it was just everything to me,” he concludes. “Cinema, theatre, cinema. It’s the power and importance of a story.

“That’s all we want. And that’s why we do these things, to create a world where people feel safe to come with us.”