One weekend in the mid-2000s, John Galliano, then flamboyant as the king of Parisian fashion who turned the house of Christian Dior into pop culture dynamite with his beautiful dresses and wild catwalk shows, returned to London for a weekend. He entered the Ritz, where he got so drunk that he stood naked in the elevator for four hours, telling guests who tried to get in that he was a lion and growling at them. The Ritz called its office in Paris and apologized and offered to cover the bills for any inconvenienced guests. The following week, Galliano returned to work.
This story is one of the jaw-dropping moments in Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary, High & Low: John Galliano. This is not a trajectory that will end happily – and in fact, we already know where and when this story ends badly: In February 2011, at La Perle bar in Paris, a drunken Galliano was filmed performing a series of songs. racist and antisemitic statements including references to gas chambers and “I love Hitler”. He was fired from his job, condemned by the media, convicted and fined by a French court, and sank into rehab and obscurity. A step ahead of the rest as always, she was one of the first celebrities to be “cancelled” by the social media age, before the phrase became commonplace.
Galliano, now ten years sober, spent five days talking to Macdonald’s camera. “I’ll tell you everything,” he says at the beginning. Thin, tanned and with a ponytail, this man could be a yoga instructor at a luxury resort in Ibiza. But there’s still theater in the foppish air in Jack Sparrow’s slicked-back hair and in his extraordinary voice, which lurches from the talking clock to the Peckham vowels of Only Fools and Horses.
High & Low is a chilling portrait of addiction and a delightful journey down memory lane into one of the most colorful chapters in fashion history. We begin with the boy who arrives in Streatham from Gibraltar with parents horrified by his homosexuality and finds his calling as one of Central Saint Martins’ greatest ever prodigies. The footage from their first show is spectacular. In one of them, shaggy-haired models stagger down the catwalk in clogs, clutching dead mackerel for undisclosed reasons. Kate Moss remembers teaching him to walk: shoulders back, pelvis forward. Galliano explains the technique that makes slip dresses so sexy; It cuts the fabric with bias so that it bends on the wearer, the fibers melt at the points where the fabric touches the skin and the dress flows off the body like butter from hot toast.
But never mind the prejudice. What made Galliano a genius was that his clothes allowed you to capture emotions. Even in grainy footage of low-budget shows, each model looks electric, as if their personalities were wired into the power grid. It creates a fashion that sounds ridiculous on the page; The shipwrecked flamenco dancer goes to the nightclub, anyone? – but somehow it’s a joy to watch.
Alcohol is a threat from the beginning of the film. Moss laughs it off in classic British fashion – “We’re both a bit shy and awkward until we’ve had a drink” – but the teenage habit of going on a solo bender from the highest fashion event and spending days locked up in a room drinking alone and watching videos of the show turns into serious abuse .
Galliano was in no mood to pack his bags and head to rehab, and no one took it upon themselves to intervene.
We see Galliano preparing for a show the day after his father’s funeral in 2003, his voice slurred, his pupils wide. In 2007, his close friend and colleague Steven Robinson was found dead in his Paris apartment with seven grams of cocaine in his system; It was a loss that greatly upset the already fragile Galliano. Valium, bromides, amphetamines and sleeping pills were added to his drinking habit, and he “couldn’t go to bed without my bottles lined up next to the bed,” he says. “I was slowly committing suicide”
The 1990s and 2000s were the period when fashion transformed from a niche industry into a pop-cultural juggernaut. Riding that wave, Galliano was dragged far out of his depth. We see the industry swell, celebrities and photographers proliferate, and Galliano increasingly lose touch with reality. I remember being backstage after a Dior show in the mid-2000s, trying to find Galliano to get a quote, only to find him cut off from the festivities, locked in a private VVIP room, flanked by two enormous security guards and under the watchful eye of an assistant. His job was to light his endless cigarettes.
Dior boss Sidney Toledano says on-screen that Galliano has been offered six months off to recover; Galliano says he does not remember such an offer. But this is a controversial issue; In the grip of addiction — to alcohol and perhaps fashion or the high drama of his job — Galliano wasn’t in the mood to pack a bag and check into rehab, and no one around him took any notice. their own intervention.
When news broke about Galliano’s outburst in 2011, I was in a room full of fashion journalists waiting for the New York fashion week show to begin, and we all shared the same reaction: John Galliano was out of his mind and acting erratically. Sure, but is it racist and antisemitic? No way. Now Galliano had become an exaggerated figure, his aesthetic transformed into pantomime. He’d complete the end-of-show broadcast by dressing up as an astronaut or prize fighter, or as Lieutenant Pinkerton from Madame Butterfly, complete with thigh-high leather boots and feathered hat. Although the atmosphere had turned a bit Masked Singer, there was no sign of ill will.
But it soon became clear that Galliano was indeed the unprovoked instigator of disgusting abuse. He was exiled from fashion, but that didn’t last long. That same year, she designed Moss’s wedding dress; he called this project “creative rehabilitation”.
The fashion world is not doing well in Macdonald’s film. The quick dismissal of his behavior doesn’t sit well with an industry that claims to value diversity. As if that’s the end of the matter, Naomi Campbell is largely dismissive of the entire incident, saying she never watched the video.
Galliano’s psychiatrist suggests he stumbled upon a hateful stereotype in our culture, seemingly at random
Frustratingly for the viewer – and, you guessed it, for Macdonald – neither Galliano nor anyone around him seems to know where the antisemitism he expresses comes from. His yelling descends without warning from taunts about being ugly on the playground to vile racism. A rabbi who worked with Galliano to educate him states that he knew little about the Holocaust and thought little about either Judaism or antisemitism. His psychiatrist suggests that he has stumbled upon a hateful stereotype in our culture, seemingly at random. Toledano, who is Jewish, suggests that antisemitism may have been built into his Spanish Catholic upbringing.
The film offers no easy answers either to the psychological question of what made Galliano do this or to the related moral question of whether he should be forgiven. There are exterior shots of Galliano looking vaguely pensive, and some chatter about his recovery for the rest of his life, but he seems as bewildered as everyone else by what’s happened. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, but there’s a certain carelessness about him. He says he has apologized to Philippe Virgitti, one of the people he insulted, but Virgitti refuses and Galliano is not particularly interested in Virgitti’s obvious pain.
As fate would have it, the film’s release coincides with Galliano’s return to the podium. In January, he held a show under a bridge in Paris for Martin Margiela, the house he has been designing since 2014. The performance received a foot-thumping, five-minute standing ovation and was hailed by critics as a return to old fashion. format. Toulouse-Lautrec and Brassaï references, corsets and merkins, breathtaking porcelain-effect peel-off make-up, all made for a show that “will surely be remembered in history books, collected by museums, studied by design students and probably extinguishing quiet luxury” Women’s Wear Daily writes of powerful emotions and “It has become a juggernaut with the tsunami of fashion excitement it has unleashed,” he wrote. The New York Times said “it’s been a long time since we’ve experienced a world-building spectacle like this.” Galliano told Macdonald that he made the film not to seek forgiveness but to “be understood a little more.”
I’m not sure Galliano is understood so much as forgiven. But no matter what, it may come back into fashion.
High and Low: John Galliano in cinemas in the UK, USA and Ireland from March 8.