One weekend in the mid-2000s John Galliano, then in his pomp as the king of Paris fashion, whose beautiful dresses and wild catwalk shows had transformed the house of Christian Dior into pop-cultural dynamite, came back to London for a weekend. He checked into the Ritz, where he proceeded to get so drunk that he spent four hours naked in a lift, telling guests who tried to enter that he was a lion, and warning them off with a growl. The Ritz called his office in Paris, who apologised, offering to cover the bills of any guests who had been inconvenienced. The following week Galliano was back at work.
This story is one of many jaw-dropping moments in Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary, High & Low: John Galliano. This is not a trajectory that tends to end happily – and indeed, we already know where and when this story came to its particularly nasty end: in La Perle bar in Paris, in February 2011, when a wasted Galliano was filmed making a string of racist and antisemitic remarks that included allusions to the gas chambers, and saying “I love Hitler”. Fired from his job, condemned by the media, convicted and fined by a French court, he disappeared into rehab and obscurity. Ahead of the curve as ever, he was one of the first celebrities to be “cancelled” by the social media age, before that phrase was in common parlance.
