The fashion world, for most of us working in it, exists in fleeting moments. There are front row seats at super brand shows, then school pick-up in the rain. A colleague in Milan this week laughed that “you have to adjust your eye” when you exit — people don’t look like models in real life. Yet for those that give over their lives to this industry, there is no life beyond the bubble. One of the most revealing parts of the forthcoming documentary about John Galliano, Kevin Macdonald’s High & Low, is an aside from his sister: “I haven’t seen him in years.”
Galliano has seemingly never adjusted his eye. A long-fêted wunderkind, the then creative director of Dior, his life in the bubble was indelibly punctured by his appalling behaviour over a few fateful nights at Le Pearl, a bar in the Marais, where his addled antisemitic abuse included saying he loved Hitler, and that the two women’s (who were not Jewish) forefathers would be gassed. It’s reassuring, given the current state of antisemitism, that his words cut with as much horror as they did when the video first went viral in 2011.
