At the height of his fame as Christian Dior’s fêted creative director, John Galliano took his curtain calls in elaborate costumes: a matador, an astronaut, a glam rock Napoleon, complete with bicorne and tumbling blond curls. Today Galliano is in charge at Maison Margiela — the label founded in the 1980s by a diffident Belgian who never showed his face — where he watches shows backstage and the labels inside his creations bear another designer’s name. No bow, and certainly no costume.
“Cut-off jeans, sitting by the recycling bins — it’s quite an amazing shift,” says Kevin Macdonald, the director of High & Low, a new documentary following the lavish ascent and egregious fall of the man who was once fashion’s most extravagant talent. “There’s something almost preordained about the fact he ends up somewhere so famously anonymous.”
In Macdonald’s film, as Galliano’s latest show closes and the audience bursts into applause, the designer dashes to the loo, where the mike pack picks up something close to a panic attack. “Hollywood films are all about people seeing the light and changing who they are,” Macdonald says. “There aren’t many times that happens in real life.”
And there aren’t many real lives quite as rollercoaster as Galliano’s either — though he joins Whitney Houston and Bob Marley in Macdonald’s back catalogue of God-givens squandered and trajectories cut short. Born in Gibraltar and raised in south London, the designer with a magpie eye became the best-paid and most indulged of the Nineties and Noughties. His catwalks were more fairytale than fashion parade, with their casts of fleeing princesses, heartbroken showgirls and punk schoolgirls in ancient Egypt. The autumn 1994 show that netted him his first big job at Givenchy featured obi belts, bias-cut slips and embroidered Japonisme that remain part of the wardrobe canon. Linda Evangelista, Helena Christensen, Kate Moss and Carla Bruni walked in it for free, such was their conviction that this was fashion history.
But in 2011 Galliano became a pariah overnight. In February a couple complained to the police that he had insulted them outside a Paris bar, calling them a “f***ing ugly Jewish bitch” and a “f***ing Asian bastard”. Galliano began defamation proceedings, before phone footage of a separate incident in December 2010 emerged — of the designer drunk outside the same bar, telling the women at the table next to him that he “loved Hitler” because “your forefathers would all be f***ing gassed”. Another woman came forward to say he had made similar comments to her, in the same bar, in October 2010.
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High & Low opens with that grainy phone footage: Galliano slouched and slurring, a backing track of shocked horror-giggles from the nearby diners filming him. He was dropped by Dior immediately, and the A-listers he clothed distanced themselves. Natalie Portman, a face of Dior, said that“as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr Galliano in any way”. (Galliano’s friend Eva Green, however, told Vogue: “I don’t think he’s antisemitic. I’m Jewish … he was probably a bit drunk.”) He was taken to court via rehab, convicted and fined €6,000 for hate speech, and ever since has existed in the carefully penitent role of non-public person. He was briefly visible in a short film streamed by Vogue last year, a blur styling Kate Moss. It seemed to sum up his status: officially erased, a phantom. Cancelled.
Yet here he is again, front and centre on screen, hands shaking as he lights one of the cigarettes he is rarely without. “It was a disgusting, foul thing that I did,” Galliano says, looking into the camera. “I’m going to tell you everything.”
The idea for the film came in lockdown, as Macdonald watched pile-on after neurotic pile-on unfold across Twitter. In the 13 years since Galliano exited the stage, cancel culture has become commonplace, its spotlight more intense owing to the global “on” of the internet, but also more transitory. The paradox of social media — still fledgling in 2011 — is that it has made us not only more susceptible to outrage but more inured to hate.
Macdonald gives the example of Kanye West, who was cancelled for an antisemitic tweet posted in 2022, then last year apologised in Hebrew and now has a new album out. “It didn’t make any difference,” he says, shrugging in recognition of West’s continued success. “But there was this bloom of cancellations and I began to think about forgiveness. What happens to people who’ve broken a taboo? Do they come back? Or is it just a gradual forgetting?”
Macdonald contacted Galliano after a friend suggested he get in touch. “It was immediately obvious that he was interested — and that he had been thinking about it himself.” Macdonald knew it would be a complex story. “I didn’t want to make a film which was ‘John Galliano has done the work and should be forgiven’,” he says. “This is not a three-act film of the rise, the success, the end. We’ve got an awkward fourth act.”
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What the film makes evident is that the designer still has a core of well-connected supporters intent on keeping his memory alive, as well as keeping him in work. Moss, whose 2011 bias-cut silk wedding dress was “creative rehab” — Galliano’s first commission post-Dior — says she remembers him teaching her how to walk: “Put your hips forward and lean back!” Naomi Campbell, who booked him into rehab, says she has never seen the footage from Café La Perle: “I didn’t need to watch that video. I know him.” Charlize Theron, a face of Dior whose father struggled with addiction, refuses to sit in judgment but concedes that she will “never make excuses for him — it was despicable behaviour”.
The Vogue editor Anna Wintour helped Galliano to get his first role at Givenchy and, after 2011, found him placements at Oscar de la Renta, and then Margiela. “It always puzzled me that [Wintour] decided to expend political capital on John,” Macdonald says. “Other than thinking he’s really talented, what possible reason could she have for risking herself and her company for this man who has been so vilified?” In the film, Wintour explains that it isn’t often you meet a great designer “who really changes the way women dress or look. He was one of them, so we had to help him.”
Their loyalty will be scrutinised in ways that Macdonald could not have anticipated as he made the film. A month before its release, figures showed that incidents of antisemitism rose by 589 per cent in the UK last year, as conflict raged between Israel and Hamas.
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“I’m optimistic it will have more resonance,” says Macdonald, whose own background is Jewish (his maternal grandfather was the Hungarian-born director Emeric Pressburger). “It’s a discussion we should be having — about where hate speech comes from, how certain stereotypes get locked into culture.”
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It is not the first time he has tackled such issues: in a 1998 short, he followed seven survivors of the Kindertransport, while his One Day in September — which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2000 — looked at the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Yet High & Low has prompted the fiercest debate at preview screenings, he says.
Galliano has always maintained that he is not antisemitic or racist, but was struggling with his workload, as well as addiction (to alcohol, Valium and sleeping tablets) and depression, after the deaths of his father and of his closest friend. His contemporary Alexander McQueen, who succeeded him at Givenchy, killed himself in 2010, a sign of the pressure creative minds were under at the industry’s biggest conglomerates, and of how little pastoral care was available to them. Among the least repentant on screen are the execs who were aware of Galliano’s instability. “He never said, ‘I’m not feeling well,’” says Dior’s former CEO Sidney Toledano, after acknowledging payments to hotels that Galliano had trashed, and that others had raised the issue of his drinking. “The work doesn’t bring you to burnout — he was pushing himself to the limit.”
Both Galliano and McQueen had difficult upbringings, growing up gay in traditional working-class families with abusive father figures. Both careers bridged the catwalk’s transition from insider trade shows to giant publicity drives, as well as the celebrity red carpet boom. Millions of dollars rode on their “vision”.
![“[Galliano’s] shows are an expression of the things he is going through”](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fa4bbaa65-0c34-49f2-8947-c728e75b6324.jpg?crop=4112%2C4077%2C56%2C80)
When Galliano’s father died three days before a Dior couture show in 2002, his boss Bernard Arnault, of LVMH, loaned him a private jet to attend the funeral in Gibraltar. Returning to Paris immediately, he worked through the night on final adjustments to a series of five-figure price tag gowns inspired by flamenco dancers and toreadors.
“Nobody talked about mental health during the 1990s and 2000s,” Macdonald says. “But I had this revelation in the cutting room: that Spanish show is all about his father dying, and the hatred and love he feels, the necessity of putting up a façade. [Galliano’s] shows are an expression of the things he is going through — that is the definition of an artist.”
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Genius has long been plotted along the axes of brilliance and offensiveness, with the former often excusing the latter in ways that would now be considered unacceptable. Are digital lynch mobs an expression of puritanism or progress? “I do think people are scared to say or do things, and self-censorship is not great for creativity,” Macdonald says. “There’s something puerile in the idea that we should judge every piece of art by the morality of its creator, but times and standards change. It’s not unreasonable to expect creators to be responsible for their behaviour in the here and now.”
Yet it is precisely this responsibility that the film suggests Galliano was looking to throw off. “He said the worst thing you could say because he thought it would destroy his life, which is what he wanted at that moment,” Macdonald says. “I don’t think he’s ideologically antisemitic or a Nazi.”
“I couldn’t recognise that person,” Galliano now says of the footage. “I was horrified. Ashamed. Embarrassed.” Later he adds: “I can say I’m not racist but every day you learn, actually, all of us are a bit — we just need to unlearn it.”
Galliano’s was one of the first shamings of the camera phone era. “If he had shared those things a few years earlier, it might well have been brushed off,” says Macdonald. “It’s one of the many debates in our Q&As — along with in vino veritas: whether what comes out when you’re drunk is real.”
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Macdonald talks to Philippe Virgitti, the man whom Galliano called “an Asian bastard”, and who still seems broken by the attention the case brought. He regrets saying it was “a simple bar dispute”, telling the director: “I am annoyed at myself now … because I believe he is racist and antisemitic. If he wasn’t racist, he would have apologised — but it has been ten years and not a call or letter.” Galliano argues he apologised in court, and that “there was eye contact”, but these interviews do not reflect well on the designer, whose strange carelessness about the incidents — conflating two evenings into one — doesn’t match the high-profile penitence.
But how sorry must an addict be for behaviour they don’t recall? “It made [the film] hard to edit,” Macdonald admits, “because we’ve got this fourth awkward act to be sober and analyse what happened.”
In January, after the cameras stopped rolling, Galliano presented a collection in Paris that was hailed as a return to his showman days: models strode the catwalk like the dramatis personae he used to invent. Still no bow or curtain call, but his name was all over social media in a way it hadn’t been for years, no longer redacted. Galliano had “reinvigorated everyone’s love for fashion”, the US Harper’s Bazaar breathlessly reported, with “the kind of show he was famous for … before the internet took over”.
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Macdonald says the designer gave him only one proviso when making High & Low: hope. “He said, I want people who are addicts to know that when things are really, really terrible that you can come back from it.” That aside, Macdonald says, his is “the most independent film you could make”. And it does feel even-handed: for every exposition of tortured genius, there is plenty of creative narcissism — of monstrous ego, even.
“John was not an angel,” Macdonald tells me. “He could be unpleasant, vicious. He wasn’t popular with a lot of people, but I was surprised that most of the names I approached wanted to take part. That says something about the loyalty he instils.”
Towards the end of the project, Macdonald realised that the final Margiela show his crew was filming was inspired by the making of a film about forgiveness: “I wasn’t sure who had been pulling the strings at which point.” On camera, the designer tells him he is “clean and sober”: “I am trying to make amends in the best way I can.”
Galliano’s retreat from public life is mirrored in the film by scenes of him in his happy place: the French countryside that has provided such solace. Yet there is a sense throughout High & Low that he is cultivating more than just his garden. Will this film lay the groundwork for a return to the front line?
High Low — John Galliano screens at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 5 Tuesday and is on general release from March 8
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