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John Galliano’s spring show was epic, just like the worldly and mysterious muse who inspired him this season. In the late 1920s, Maria Lani enthralled Paris’s painters from Mogdiliani to Matisse to Soutine, posing for each under the pretext that she would use their work to make a horror film about a painting come to life. Then, without warning, she sold off all her canvases and ran away to America. On Sunday evening, however, Lani herself came to life, appearing once more, stepping out of the mist and onto Galliano’s runway wearing an organza-and-lace trench coat. Galliano’s ode to Lani was evocative, pretty, and full of fabulous clothes. But her arrival was also timely.

While mesmerized by this strange muse and her exploits, the designer managed to fall into step with some of the season’s biggest trends, each executed in a purely Galliano manner. First, there were his wonderful trench coats, in organza, for example, done up with lace panels or cut short and cropped. His rendition of fashion’s new voluminous silhouettes translated into a glazed snakeskin car coat, swaggering trousers printed with colorful butterflies, or a canvas baseball jacket worn over a filmy wisp of a dress. While there was a certain nostalgia about it all, these were not costumes. He sent out clothes that had loads of personality—an appealingly eccentric one—but that were modern and wearable, too. In tiered ruffles, one of the collection’s main themes, he did fluttering short skirts and angelic lace dresses, along with a handsome black jacket banded with gold embroidery. There were silken kimonos worn as coats, and mix-and-match florals in red and aqua blue. Basically, Galliano’s runway was a fashion Shangri-la.

And that was all before the sun went down. A finale of evening gowns, mostly in gossamer white and embroidered with silver, were breathtaking. All week the talk has been about how fashion has moved on from red-carpet dressing. That may be true, but these were the kinds of gowns that women dream about, once-in-a-lifetime dresses, no matter what the fashion of the times. Lani would have loved them. In fact, she would have worn one to her next sitting.