In December 2010, John Galiano, one of the most celebrated British designers of all time, murdered his own career with a drunken anti-Semitic tirade in a Paris café. Kevin Macdonald’s feature-length documentary, High & Low: John Galliano, features footage of Galliano’s meltdown, and it’s not a pretty sight. The same could be said of Galliano’s entire life in fashion, but up until this moment, signalled at the beginning of the film, the grotesque extravagance of his designs and his lifestyle had been no impediment to success. On the contrary, it was all part of Galliano’s mystique.
Born in Gibraltar into a Spanish family that migrated to London when he was six years old, Galliano – whose full name is Juan Carlos Antonio Galliano-Guillén – would grow up in a poor, working-class neighbourhood. He knew from an early age that he was gay, but also that his father, a plumber, was fiercely homophobic. Galliano loved to dress up and try on his mother’s lipstick when no-one was looking. According to his sister, he always had a love of costume and a vivid imagination.
At Central St. Martin’s, Galliano was considered a star student. His graduation show of 1984, Les Incroyables, took its name and inspiration from a group of French aristocrats who survived the Revolution, and would hold decadent fancy dress parties. This was all Galliano needed to send models down the catwalk in mutant versions of 18th century costume, with suitable headware. The collection may have borrowed from the French Revolution, but also from the ‘pirates’ or highwayman’ masquerades of pop star, Adam Ant, and a restoration of Abel Gance’s epic film, Napoleon (1927), which left Galliano entranced. Clips from Gance’s film appear throughout the documentary, portraying Napoleon as the designer’s alter ego.
Les Incroyables set the standard for Galliano’s brand of fashion, which drew on any place or period that caught his fancy, with maximum flamboyance and exaggeration. The success of his student show prompted him to start his own label, which went bankrupt in 1989 as he failed to turn critical acclaim into sales. Backers eventually tired of his casual preference for art-for-art’s-sake over grubby finance.
Galliano may have been a hopeless businessman, but this did not prevent Givenchy from hiring him as chief designer in 1995. The following year, fashion tycoon, Bernard Arnault, took the bold move of reassigning Galliano to Christian Dior, the apogee of haute couture. During his fourteeen years at Dior, Galliano would gather rave reviews from fashion oracles such as Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley at Vogue, who hailed him as a miraculous talent.
As Galliano’s time at Dior was lived in public, Macdonald is able to track his career with archival footage interspersed with contemporary interviews with the man himself. Galliano reflects on his successes, indulgences and misdeeds, but often has no explanation for his behaviour. “I don’t know,” takes on a terribly credible dimension when he discusses his alcoholic binges and blackouts. On one occasion he spent four hours stark naked in an elevator at the Ritz, London, telling everyone he was a lion. Nothing funny about that… Nowadays he’s off the booze and drugs, has apologised for his apalling behaviour, and is designing for Maison Martin Margiela. It’s a breathless ride for the viewer, broken by regular, calming visits to the present day.
Macdonald explored similar territory in his 2018 documentary on Whitney Houston – a prodigious talent from a poor background, propelled to the top of the world then destroyed by the demands of fame. Houston didn’t get out alive, but Galliano is making the most of his second chance.
With other fashion designers it’s not uncommon to see them take a bow wearing only a black t-shirt and jeans, or in Karl Lagerfeld’s case, his weird uniform with its absurdly high collar, shades and gloves. Not so with Galliano, who changed his image from day to day, dressing as outrageously as any of his models. His pathological exhibitionism had to find a personal outlet. As well as Gance’s Napoleon, Macdonald treats us to regular excerpts from the high fantasy of Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) – another story that didn’t end well.
The pressure under which Galliano worked was ridiculous. He designed six collections a year for Dior alone, and two more for his own label. He designed lines of accessories and shoes. He says that at one point he was responsible for 32 collections in a year. To be consistently creative at such a high level, year after year, would be enough to drive anyone mad. We’ve already seen the effects of this pressure on celebrated designers. Yves Saint-Laurent became a demented wreck, Alexander McQueen killed himself. Most simply burn out.
For Galliano, whose psyche resembles a ball of wool that’s been with the kittens for a few days, his fall from grace seems to have arrived in stages. A crucial catalyst was the loss of his studio manager, Steven Robinson in April 2007. Although he looked slovenly and unhealthy, Robinson, who had been with Galliano since his early days, was an indispensible part of the operation. Over the years he had developed an instinctive understanding of what his capricious boss was trying to achieve. His death would escalate the already enormous pressures under which Galliano worked.
There were many signs, even before his final crash, that the designer was not living on the same planet as everybody else. His Hobo collection of 2000 stirred protests from those who believed he was mocking the homeless and underprivileged – charges that left him feeling bewildered. He claimed the collection had been “inspired” by the street people he saw on his morning jog and couldn’t see why anyone should be offended.
The virulent anti-Semitic outbursts that would see him lose his job at Dior and be prosecuted in the French courts, might be read as a perverse escape act engineered by his subconscious. Drinking himself into an amnesiac stupor while pickled with prescription drugs, he seems to have gone searching for the most shocking, offensive topic he could find. It was a virtuoso act of self-destruction that forced his Jewish boss, Sidney Toledano, to cut him loose, even if he didn’t really believe Galliano was a Hitler-worshipping anti-Semite.
Two years later, claiming to be clean and remorseful, Galliano’s attempt at a comeback would be derailed when he appeared in public in an outfit that came across as a parody of a Hasidic Jew. Once again, he found it hard to understand what he had done wrong. It was as if his voracious visual sense had become detached from any social, ethical or moral considerations.
There are many who will never believe Galliano’s stories or forgive his actions, even if the industry seems to have taken him back into the fold. This film is part of the redemption process, as he speaks candidly about himself, and gives every impression of being older and wiser. Should we feel sorry for him? We know the fashion business is a monster that devours its most talented children, but Galliano immersed himself in its deadly fantasy and doesn’t inspire much sympathy. He acts like a man who has just awakened from a bad dream and is eager to go back for another session.
High & Low: John Galliano
Written & directed by Kevin Macdonald
Starring: John Galliano, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Bernard Arnault, Sidney Toledano, Anna Wintour, Alexis Roche, André Leon Talley, Robin Givhan, Amanda Harlech, Hamish Bowles
UK/USA/France, M, 116 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 1 June, 2024