John Galliano, creative director of Maison Margiela, captivated the fashion industry when presenting his couture collection on the runway back in January. The show’s backdrop was a Paris nightclub. Models with porcelain doll-like makeup wore clothes that were distressed, tattered, and ethereal. The audience saw extreme corsetry and even merkins.
This was a return to form for Galliano, whose edginess and youthfulness in the 1990s and 2000s turned Christian Dior, where he was the head designer, into a billion-dollar business. But after that success, he began drinking excessively. In 2011, a video surfaced of him giving a drunken, racist, and antisemitic rant at a Paris bar, which led to his firing at Dior. It’s all shown in Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary, High & Low: John Galliano.
Galliano stands out as the first British designer to ever receive the reins to a French haute couture house — Givenchy in 1995. Then he went to Christian Dior, which Macdonald says is “one of the two or three big jewels in the fashion world.”
“He had this punkish, anarchic, but at the same time very beautiful approach to fashion. It was all about fantasy, all about [being] larger than life, all about the shows as much as it was about the individual items of clothing. … He was interested in provoking a strong emotion. … The head of Dior at the time said to me, ‘It's about selling a dream.’ … And Galliano was an expert at creating the dream.”
Macdonald notes that Galliano didn’t care about money — he went bankrupt three or four times after creating his own label post-college graduation in London in 1985.
“He just wanted to realize these dreams in fabric. And it was only when he then went to Givenchy that he showed that he could actually also make clothes that people wanted to buy. But of course, it's not the couture clothes, the runway clothes, nobody makes any money really out of that. It's about the diffusion lines. It's about how that influences the high street. And also in his case, it's about selling a lot of perfume, selling a lot of lipstick. You can't afford to buy the Dior dress for $100,000, but you can afford to buy J’Adore, which is the perfume that John created. And that's what these companies make their fortunes out of.”
At one point, Galliano ran his namesake brand and Dior. He describes the workload in the documentary, “Sometimes I used to giggle and look at the planning because it reminded me of the underground map in London. I was doing two ladies’ ready-to-wear, two men’s ready-to-wear. There was a second line twice a year. There was a children’s line twice a year. Shoe collection twice a year. Bag collection twice a year. Costume collection twice a year. Fine jewelry twice a year. Watches once a year. That’s just Galliano.”
The designer eventually broke down due to huge amounts of stress and overworking, Macdonald explains.
“If you give an obsessive artist … the reins to everything they ever dreamed of, whatever they want, they're going to take control because that's in their nature. They're not going to say, ‘No, no, no, I've got to have a day off.’ And so I think in a way, the industry took advantage of him a little bit, like it did of Alexander McQueen. And Alexander McQueen ended up committing suicide just a year before John had his breakdown.”
Macdonald explains that Galliano’s collapse took several years. He increasingly exhibited unstable behavior, was unpleasant to colleagues, and locked himself in hotel rooms. However, he got away with it for a while because he was bringing in money.
“He had been an alcoholic his whole life. But it got worse and worse. He was taking a lot of prescription drugs. There's a moment in the film where he describes vividly and horrifically how he couldn't go to sleep unless there were six bottles of red wine open by the side of his bed with pills dissolved in them already. … He was within weeks, I think, of killing himself, poisoning himself when these incidents in the Paris bar came to light. And he was fired and lost everything.”
He continues, “If you ask John about it now, he says obviously this was the worst moment in his life. This was a humiliation and embarrassment that's going to follow him to his grave. It's gonna be the first line in his obituary. But at the same time, he'll say to you, ‘That saved my life.’ So he has this odd relationship to this moment in time, when he was completely vilified and ostracized.”
John Galliano returns to the Dior archive for the first time since 2011. Photo by David Harriman.
In the film, Macdonald asks Galliano why he repeatedly made antisemitic remarks. His answer: “I don’t know.”
“I don't know if that's a non-answer because that makes it sound as though he's avoiding the truth,” Macdonald explains. “I think what's more disturbing, but also mysterious, is what happens if you really can't remember because he was a blackout drinker. And you say something which has come from somewhere within your subconscious, and does that make you antisemitic? Do you mean those things? … I don't come to a definitive conclusion. The film is very open-ended. I want to provoke discussion, in a way, and debate.”
Galliano eventually spent a lot of time with a London-based rabbi who took him to a synagogue, taught him Jewish history, and introduced him to members of the Jewish community and a Holocaust survivor.
“John did the work. He tried to apologize, to move on in his life. But it's not always possible, particularly I think, with this racist outburst to expect people just to forgive and forget and to move on.”
Then in 2014, three years after losing his job at Dior, Galliano joined Maison Margiela. However, Macdonald explains that the label is about anonymity, simplicity, and minimalism — the opposite of Galliano’s style. And so, coming aboard was a way for him to not attract attention, which he achieved for many years, as he made modest and simple clothes.
Then just in the last few years, he started being flowery and “making things that are more in the Galliano mold of old,” Macdonald says.
He points out that Galliano’s career is fascinating because he had a downfall that would have ended most other people’s careers, but over the course of a decade, he came back and is now producing work that people think is equal to or better than his previous designs.
His social capital also played a role.
“He was given the opportunity that other people wouldn't have been given to come back. … He was so beloved … by people who felt he was their friend … like Naomi Campbell, and Kate Moss, and Anna Wintour. But sometimes also because people just felt he's a great talent, and we want to have him back.”