Dior crowing after victory for Galliano the gladiator

Headwear that looked like a cross between knitted Peruvian skullcaps and Roman Centurion helmets. Gladiator boots embellished with tufts of multicoloured fur. Full, flippy skirts, heavy with beads, sequins and mirrors, worn with skinny rainbow-coloured Airtex and shimmering fish-skin jackets.

After a relatively straightforward week at the Milan collections – think sex and money, handbags and shoes – the creative delirium of John Galliano or Christian Dior that opened the Paris shows yesterday came as something as a shock. This was fashion at its most apparently fantastic – unbridled imagination at its indulgent best.

The designer was clearly following a Latin American theme this time round, although with Galliano, things are rarely that simple. Embroidered denim dresses and boot-cut jeans were more King's Road circa 1970. Fringed evening dresses looked like something a futuristic flapper might like to wear. With his lightness of touch and contemporary eye, this particular designer remains unrivalled.

More surprising is the fact that while Galliano is, without question, a designer's designer – he lives and breathes fashion and, one might have imagined in the past, has little interest in marketing – he has an ability to see just beyond the clothes to the commercial reality that must go with them.

In 1996, Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the mighty LVMH conglomerate, identified this side of the designer and duly appointed him first at Givenchy and, six months later, at Dior. Of course, at that time we all knew that Galliano could make a woman look more beautiful than perhaps anyone else working throughout the early Nineties, but nobody imagined that he could also come up with the must-have handbag, the status sunglasses and the J'Adore Dior T-shirt to match.

In the six years since he took over at the house, however, he has done just that, stamping his own brand of fashion fantasy on to a tired old status label and allowing lesser mortals – those who cannot, perhaps, afford a hugely elaborate patchwork coat in sunshine colours and lined with fur – buy into it via lucrative accessories, eyewear, cosmetics and so forth. Dior is adored once more.

Also significant is the fact that when Galliano took over, the label was entirely bereft of eveningwear. Now, anyone wealthy and indeed lovely enough to buy into such things would kill for the designer's bias cut slither of chiffon dresses: perfectly simple and utterly exquisite in black and printed with pretty bows and faded flowers.

It was a great collection, with all the respect for pure design and high craftsmanship that the French fashion capital is famous for, but with a clear marketing sensibility underpinning it which means that – whisper it – commercial success is also assured.