The strange, and strangely unedifying, story of fashion designer John Galliano is retold by film-maker Kevin Macdonald, who covers the ground and states the facts in an impeccably professional way. Yet this film feels constrained by the obvious need to be diplomatic with Galliano and his A-list supporters to whom Macdonald has intimate access.
Galliano is the brilliant Gibraltarian-British designer whose flamboyant designs electrified the world of couture in the 90s; he was creative director of both Givenchy and Dior in Paris. The acclaim was dazzling but he became seriously overworked, had issues with alcohol and drug use, was under emotional strain following the death of his assistant and friend Steven Robinson, and badly shaken by Alexander McQueen taking his own life. And then, in 2011, video emerged of him, clearly drunk, making grotesque antisemitic insults to women in a Paris cafe – one of a number of separate incidents – which earned him a criminal conviction and fine.
Galliano’s colleagues said that it was simply the booze and the drugs and the nervous breakdown talking, he wasn’t really antisemitic and we have to understand these things are symptoms. Well, that is a perfectly cogent argument. The fashion world generally took this view and evidently suppressed whatever thoughts they may have had about all those other people in the world with problems worse than Galliano’s, who somehow don’t make antisemitic insults. On Galliano’s behalf, people reached out to Holocaust educational charities and Jewish leaders and some agreed to meet him and help him educate himself.
After which, in 2013, Galliano appeared in public in New York in what the New York Post characterised as a questionable Hasidic Jewish outfit. His publicist denied any intentional resemblance (and the Anti-Defamation League described the article as a complete distortion), but Galliano doesn’t properly comment here. I wanted Macdonald to ask his interviewee: “John, what were you thinking?” Galliano only says: “There was a bit of a drama … It was a fashion look.” And he chortles: “We got out of New York as fast as possible.” I certainly wanted to hear Macdonald press Galliano directly on this fiasco, to get him to say directly that he didn’t mean to look like a Hasidic Jew and that he was mortified anyone could think so. But not really. The happy ending redemption narrative is not entirely earned.
• High & Low: John Galliano is in UK and Irish cinemas from 8 March.
