Nearly 14 years ago, John Galliano, then the creative director of Dior, was sitting on the terrace of a popular Paris restaurant when another customer began filming him. He was drunk, and he was hurling antisemitic words at the person filming and her friends, who were Jewish. The video resurfaced a few months later, in early 2011, when another such incident occurred. (In fact, similar drunken and profane rages occurred a total of three times.)
Galliano was fired from Dior, charged by a Paris court and found guilty of making antisemitic remarks. “I love Hitler,” he had said to the woman in the restaurant. “People like you would be dead.” After the conviction, he essentially disappeared.
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But within two years, he began making a quiet return. He worked as a guest designer at Oscar de la Renta, a setup arranged by Vogue editor Anna Wintour. He met with prominent Jewish leaders to ask for forgiveness, meetings organized by Condé Nast chairman Jonathan Newhouse. He gave an interview to Vanity Fair and posed for Annie Leibovitz on a rock in swirling water, like a beached mermaid longing to be back at sea. By the next year, he was redeemed enough that he was appointed the creative director of Maison Margiela.
Like his predecessor, Martin Margiela, he never bows at the end of shows and rarely grants interviews. But Galliano’s designs are not particularly Margiela-esque; they are clearly pure, unfiltered Galliano. And why not? He is, without a doubt, one of the greatest living fashion designers — whether you believe he is an antisemite or not. Now comes the moment when, more directly than ever before, we are asked whether we can truly hold those two dissonant ideas in our heads at the same time.
End of carouselGalliano is the subject and star of a new documentary, “High & Low: John Galliano,” by director Kevin Macdonald, known for his attraction to morally ambiguous or flawed characters — dictators and terrorists, but also Mick Jagger and Whitney Houston.
“I’ve made a lot of films about people who are, you know, you’re not quite certain if they’re nice people or not nice people, and you’re questioning them all the time and trying to understand where, you know, what you should think about them,” Macdonald told The Washington Post earlier this month.
Macdonald said he struck on the idea of a documentary on Galliano because he was thinking about canceled figures in the film industry. “How, in a post-religious world, do you get forgiveness?” he said. “How are you redeemed, ever? In the old days, you could go and say your Hail Marys. How does that happen [now]? So that was really the first thing that I thought about, and somebody suggested John as a subject.”
Was that somebody Wintour? Dana Thomas, a veteran fashion reporter and author of a book on Galliano and Alexander McQueen called “Gods and Kings,” wrote in her fashion newsletter earlier this week that “Wintour shopped the project to directors for several years—I personally know three who turned it down—before landing Macdonald.” A Condé Nast representative declined to respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The importance of whether Condé Nast was the architect or merely a helping hand is ultimately up to each viewer to decide. Macdonald said that Wintour “got involved in this film early on to offer her help, and she was incredibly helpful,” and that they “helped smooth introductions to Dior and various other people” who would not have otherwise participated. (Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and, of course, Galliano himself are all talking heads in the film, as is The Post’s senior critic-at-large, Robin Givhan.)
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Macdonald directed with remarkable freedom, given the controlling nature of the fashion world. (Designers rarely grant interviews without their publicists present, and often ask for questions in advance. They have also been known to ask for quote and photo approval, requests that publications including The Post do not abide by.) Galliano did not ask for approval; Macdonald set up many of their conversations so the designer is looking directly into the camera, and in the opening minutes lights a cigarette and declares, “Oh, I’m going to tell you everything.” He mostly does.
And neither Wintour nor Condé Nast asked for approval. “Nobody actually tried to control the film,” Macdonald said. “I had final cut; it was independently financed.”
The timing of the documentary, which was released in theaters earlier this month, is practically operatic. The Margiela couture show that Galliano staged in January was rhapsodically reviewed, and it’s already being considered one of the greatest and most important fashion shows of the past decade, perhaps even of the 21st century.
In Paris, at Fashion Week earlier this month, rumors swirled that he was being courted by Givenchy, which is without a creative director since the departure of Matthew Williams, which was announced in December, and where Galliano worked for a brief time before taking the much larger stage at LVMH’s bigger Dior. (Givenchy did not respond to a request for comment.) One source close to the Metropolitan Museum of Art told me that the Costume Institute, which stages the blockbuster Met Gala, had considered putting on a Galliano-themed show this year. (The Met does not comment on future exhibitions, though Galliano’s work has appeared in several recent shows, and Costume Institute head Andrew Bolton wrote a 2022 book on Galliano’s tenure at Dior.)
The timing is a potential lightning rod as the Israel-Gaza war continues alongside fears of rising antisemitism.
Galliano is riding higher than he has since his Dior was the toast of the fashion world. Whether this documentary is the latest step in a highly organized campaign to bring Galliano back into the mainstream or not, are people ready to forgive him? Should they?
Since finishing filming the documentary, Galliano’s shows suggest that he has gotten something off his chest — that he feels newly free. While his collections at Margiela have been mostly fascinating if not otherworldly, the house is mostly known for the explosion of its Tabi shoes, a Martin Margiela cleft-toed creation that is now the Gen Z and millennial designer shoe du jour.
His Fall couture show in July 2022 — a “True Romance”-ish film and live performance featuring incestual stepsiblings killing their parents, which serves as the denouement to Macdonald’s film — implies that he is no longer designing apprehensively, that he is entering a new artistic prime. It was so provocatively violent that Kristina O’Neill, then-editor of WSJ Magazine, told the Cut’s fashion critic, Cathy Horyn, that she would never go to another Galliano show. Rarely does a designer today cause such a frenzy, and when they do, they almost immediately apologize.
“It’s one of the extraordinary things about John: When he should be at his most cautious and careful, he can’t seem to help himself, by tweaking everybody again,” Macdonald said. “I realized when I was shooting [the show], it was a reflection of making the documentary. It was him looking at his own life again. And that show is his artistic response to that.”
Along with that collection, his Spring 2024 ready-to-wear show, staged in Paris in October, and the January couture show, which took him a year to put together, were so extraordinary that they present a textbook test of choosing to forgive or ignore or compartmentalize an artist’s bad behavior. Creativity has all but disappeared from fashion, and here is a man who takes his time, who doesn’t want to merely sell you clothes but make you see beauty in a new way — the rejects and scalawags of city life, redeemed on the altar that a runway becomes when a really good designer puts clothes on it. Is his genius worth it?
Galliano told Macdonald that “I don’t expect them to forgive me, but I want to be understood.” What do we understand about him? That he is chastened: at the beginning and end of the film, you see him backstage at that violent Fall 2022 show, “in his terrible cutoff shorts and a T-shirt, and he’s sitting by the recycling bins and trash cans,” Macdonald said. It’s a million miles away from the ridiculous bows he used to take at the end of his couture shows, dressed as a pirate or a dandy. Macdonald, in the film, compares him to a puffed-up Napoleon, from the 1927 silent film by Abel Gance.
Asked why he thinks Galliano agreed to the documentary, Macdonald said: “He has an ego, and [I’m guessing] he’s like, ‘Well, that Alexander McQueen film is really successful. Everyone thinks that I’m a genius. Why don’t I have a film where people think I’m a genius?’” (McQueen, who died by suicide in 2010 and was also considered one of the 21st century’s great designers, was the subject of a documentary, “McQueen,” in 2018.)
It’s hard to square this man purring with childlike delight over movies and a simple life in the country with the ridiculous man who preened in fashion’s spotlight for decades. “It’s incredible, the journey that you’ve gone from that person to that person,” agreed Macdonald. “And, you know, his face is slightly crumpled, and the work that he’s had done doesn’t look the greatest anymore. So you see the human being, and I think that enables you to sympathize with him more, probably.”
Yet he undercuts himself at crucial moments. When asked about his rant, he says he does not remember that this happened more than once. A victim of one of his attacks, Philippe Virgitti, speaks in tears about how Galliano’s words — which included calling him an “Asian bastard” — continue to haunt him. He says Galliano never apologized to him, though Galliano claims he did.
Where the film is less ambiguous is in its role for Dior. Macdonald also surmises that Dior wanted to speak — Sidney Toledano, who was Galliano’s boss at Dior and who is also Jewish, sits for a lengthy interview — so they could talk about Galliano’s collections again. Toledano told Macdonald that when Dior recently staged a traveling exhibition of its designs by recent creative directors, including Maria Grazia Chiuri (the current creative director), Raf Simons and Galliano, “he said, ‘I looked and I thought, well, the star of the show is John. These are the great works. And yet, we’re ashamed of that.’”
This is, Macdonald continued, “a great way for them to say, ‘Okay, we’ve laid that to rest.’ And I think, so, for Dior and for John, I think that was their agenda.”
It is also, of course, an agenda that allows them to make more money off Galliano-designed products.
Cancel culture has a special place in the fashion world. It was wielded early on by fashion commentators, who seized on the industry’s propensity for tokenism and appropriation. The potential for virality was enormous: Suddenly, someone with no power or clout, or even someone with very few followers, could get products removed from shelves, entice businesses to set up new groups to encourage diversity or get someone fired.
But it’s also the most juvenile thing about fashion: Those who offend can simply be cast off or ignored. The politics seem dangerously shaped by the technology newly available when such callouts began. Galliano has recently claimed that he was the first victim of cancel culture, but that’s not really true.
He is actually the antidote to it — the other model. He has asked us to consider whether he deserves to create art, or maybe, create art that warrants attention and criticism. It can’t really be a question with a blanket answer, but if you dislike a designer, you can simply choose not to buy their products or look at their shows.
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Macdonald seems to be buying what Galliano is selling. Galliano “has not got a political bone in his body,” he said. The things he said in that video, “it was the most hurtful thing you could say at the time. And that’s horrible and unforgivable to some people. But he doesn’t actually believe in a Nazi ideology. He doesn’t want to wipe the Jews off the face of the world. I don’t think that’s my judgment.”
Despite Galliano’s meetings with Jewish leaders, and a 2013 press release from the Anti-Defamation League claiming that it “welcomes [his] recovery and redemption,” I left the film unconvinced that he knows what he said and why it was hurtful. I also left the film thoroughly convinced of his genius, unsure whether I liked him — and very charmed by him.
Macdonald compared Galliano to Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who is also trying to inch his way back into the spotlight. Macdonald said the difference between the two was that Ye is suffering from mental health issues rather than substance abuse. But there’s another key difference that should make us think twice about allowing Ye back into our head space: His new shoes are extremely mediocre.
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated which Maison Margiela show was staged in Paris in October. It was the Spring 2024 ready-to-wear show, not Fall 2023. The article has been corrected.
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