Another fashion season, another designer documentary. This time it’s John Galliano’s turn in Kevin Macdonald’s High and Low, which does precisely what it says on the tin: taking stock of the designer’s rise to fame via the well-trodden route of St Martin’s wunderkind to the highest echelons of fashion behemoth LVMH.
But rather than an overly reverential rags-to-riches tale, it starts with perhaps what was the most explosive and destructive moment of Galliano’s career cutting to grainy footage of the (blackout drunk) designer at La Perle in Paris in 2010, hurling antisemitic abuse at neighbouring tables using language so horrific it’s impossible to quote.
The fallout has been well-documented, from the swift ejection of Galliano from the creative director post at Dior womenswear — as well as a step back from his own eponymous label — but this film is billed as the first time Galliano has gone on record to explain his version of events. A version, might I add, that seems extremely malleable as he forgets on camera if it was once, no wait twice — perhaps three? — separate incidents that recorded his antisemitic tirades.
Was the intention of the doc to chart the impossible redemption of Galliano? I’m not sure if quite succeeds, though it certainly spotlights how helpful it is to have friends in high places, from Condé Nast’s Dame Anna Wintour and Jonathan Newhouse to London supers Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, who when asked if she had seen the incriminating footage, responds with a flinty: ‘I haven’t and I don’t need to… I know him as a person.’
And knowing Galliano, either personally or through this film, shows him to be a complex mix of high and low. From beginnings with an abusive father who forced him to hide his sexuality growing up in south London, through the shoestring budgets he had to pull together the early shows (many of which ironically wouldn’t have even happened without the backing of Vogue’s André Leon Talley, the most prominent Black fashion editor of the time), he crescendos with a pseudo Napoleonic complex, then crashes due to self-confessed addictions to ‘alcohol, prescription drugs and work’.
But there’s still that niggling question that sits with you throughout the doc: is he a racist or just a mean drunk? In the fashion industry, with its notoriously short memory, perhaps it doesn’t matter. At the time of writing, Galliano seems to be riding another career high, having just presented his latest couture collection in Paris with Maison Margiela, a carnival of tits, hips and corsetry, not to mention Miley Cyrus’s intensely ornate safety pin dress for the Grammys.
However cynical you might be, his genius has always been manifestly present and will inspire generations. And maybe that’s the point: that the real way Galliano beat cancellation was to do what he has always been best at. If you can separate the art from the artist, it seems that his redemption isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.
