High & Low - John Galliano

John Galliano: remember him? If you have any serious interest in fashion, his is a name you’ll never forget, but for the average person it’s rather different. When I mentioned him to my partner I got the response “Is he that horrible alcoholic designer who said all those awful things about Jewish people?”

I’ve asked around further since and that is, indeed, how a lot of people remember him. When we first see him in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary, which screened as part of the 2024 Glasgow Film Festival, he’s an odd-looking figure lurking in the shadows as glamorous models prepare for a show. The film then cuts straight to the scene which non-fashion fans will best know him for, the one that went viral on YouTube. There he is, sitting in a café with a pinched, mean expression on his face, obviously out of his skull, and we hear him make those grotesque antisemitic remarks.

“It was a disgusting thing, a foul thing that I did. it was just horrific,” he reflects in a subsequent interview clip in which he is looking noticeably healthier, 11 years sober. “I’m going to tell you everything.”

Can or should Galliano be forgiven? Is he now a different man? It’s a question which only becomes more complex as Macdonald peels away the layers. Does alcohol make people reveal the truth of who they are, or does it turn them into something else? Did Galliano’s sin lie in his words or in the thoughts behind them – and if the latter, is he really a worse person than all those other people who might think that way but keep it to themselves because they’re not afflicted by addiction? Did he atone when he sought out a rabbi who could help him to understand the harm he’s done and why it mattered, or do his apologies fall short because he never delivered them directly to the people he hurt? What about the fact that there were multiple antisemitic incidents? And what about the theory that he did what he did because, subconsciously, he wanted to be as offensive as possible in order to destroy the career that was killing him?

All these questions are asked, and more, in a film which doesn’t judge but does provide a fascinating character study. It also explores Galliano’s fashion career, from the early days when he lived hand to mouth and struggled to raise enough money for shows – essentially just as cancelled as he was after his outbursts, something which famous people insisting on attention would do well to remember – to the height of his fame, when he was creating a vast number of collections every year, and the subsequent burnout: obsessing over small errors, experiencing intense post-show depressions. Alcohol flows through everything. “I’d wake up in another part of the country sometimes and not know how I got there,” he says, recalling that he was banned from a lot of hotels. It’s not the only addiction in his story. Macdonald also looks at his obsessive use of the gym, and his deeply unhealthy relationship with work.

Lest we grow too attached to him through all of this , we also get to hear from one of the Jewish people who had to deal with his antisemitism directly, and who is clearly still wounded by it. We also meet a Jewish man who worked with him for years and was deeply disturbed after those outbursts, forced to re-evaluate their whole relationship. Macdonald very effectively gets at what that experience of hate does: the sense of isolation and paranoia it creates, the constant second-guessing of things that one ought to be able to take for granted and relax and enjoy.

Galliano ought to understand that side of it, at least. He’s been on the receiving end, growing up gay and quite unable to hide it, experiencing constant hostility from his father as a result. Macdonald frames reflections on the era with a montage set to Siousie and the Banshees’ Spellbound: Margaret Thatcher, street protests, Princess Diana; then this very clean cut boy with a neat haircut and little round glasses. The designer recalls going to see Abel Gance’s Napoleon at the Barbican and becoming obsessed with it. He will later accuse Macdonald of taking that out of proportion, but its influence can be seen again and again in snapshots from throughout his career as a fashion student, at Givenchy and then at Dior. It’s also a neat metaphor, and Macdonald uses clips from the film to link together fragments of the story.

Full of vivid imagery and lively anecdotes, often with ugly or tragic conclusions, High And Low is also packed with cameos from celebrities who worked with Galliano and remain loyal to him now: Kate Moss, Penélope Cruz and, on course, Naomi Campbell, who has had some rough times of her own. It’s a fascinating piece of work, mixing glamour and darkness and a lot of uncertainty. It’s very human.