The night of the wolf moon — the first full moon of the new year — also happened to be the last night of the couture, when John Galliano recreated a decaying Paris nightclub in the vaulted caverns beneath Paris’s Pont Alexandre III bridge across the Seine. Crepe paper streamers the color of Madeira wine were draped across walls and dangled from the ceiling amid banged-up wooden bistro chairs and scratched-up tables. At the end, the audience members were so overwrought they didn’t just clap, they stamped their feet hard enough to make the floorboards shake. It has been awhile since anyone had experienced a world-building show quite like it. It looked tortured, in a way that is rarely considered acceptable anymore, and extraordinary at the same time.

---

Persons: John Galliano, Paris’s Pont Alexandre III, Freddie Mercury, Maison Locations: Paris, Paris’s, Madeira