Models throwing fresh mackerel at audience members; impersonating a lion while naked in a hotel elevator for four hours straight; a signature style of cutting fabric on the bias, giving birth to the iconic black slip dresses that took over in the 90s and forever after. Fashion designer John Galliano has made headlines for his virtuosic, generation-defining work on the catwalk as much as for his ludicrous antics offstage.
But for a documentary that recounts the divisive figure’s inexplicable fall from grace and everything that preceded it, High & Low is structured rather conventionally. Interspersing archival footage with talking head interviews and snippets of a six-day-long conversation with Galliano himself, the documentary unfolds largely chronologically.
As he traces the career of a larger-than-life figure, director Kevin Macdonald (Whitney; The Last King of Scotland) has to contend with what Galliano is most infamous for: successive anti-Semitic outbursts that resulted in him being prosecuted by a French court and sacked as creative director of Dior in 2011. And that is how the documentary opens – Galliano’s recorded racist tirade is presented in all its jaw-dropping horridness.
As Macdonald charts Galliano’s life, it’s almost as though he’s excavating it for clues, signs, justifications as to what transpired.
We’re thrust into Galliano’s troubled childhood and the halcyon days of his youth. Growing up within a cloistered Spanish-Gibraltan migrant family who moved to London when Galliano was six, the budding creative learns to live in his head as he comes to terms with his queerness, while living in a homophobic household intent on quashing it.
The liberatory, fashion-forward subversiveness of the underground New Romantic movement in London arrives as a breath of fresh air after the repressiveness of Galliano’s childhood. Macdonald expertly evokes the trend through the reverberations of 80s synth-pop and the quaint sheen of low-resolution photographs.
The documentary hurtles along the trajectory of his career, including Galliano cutting his teeth as a fresh-faced ingenue straight out of the famed art school Central Saint Martins.
The graduate fashion show that put him on the map – the French Revolution-inspired Les Incroyables – leads to multiple career-defining runway productions, before Galliano is offered the role of creative director at Givenchy and is promptly whisked away to be creative director at Dior. This is where he gains unprecedented levels of fame and adulation, and when his mental health precipitously declines.
The theme of escapism and the salve of an imagination are mainstays of Galliano’s work, but as his fashion shows become increasingly elevated flights of fantasy, with models more like actors than exhibitors of clothing, his grip on reality also loosens.
Addictions to work, substances and exercise begin to take hold as Galliano suffers devastating losses in his personal life – first his father, then his life anchor and right-hand man Steven Robinson – while the unrelenting demands of being a fashion designer never abate. In one particularly revealing section, Galliano describes working on more than 32 collections a year.
Exacerbating the melancholy are black-and-white clips from the 1927 silent film Napoléon – in part underlining Galliano’s growing godlike complex, his “Napoleonic display of ego”, in part a homage to Galliano’s lifelong preoccupation with the figure.
The dichotomy between the high and low is ever-present throughout the documentary. Galliano, the son of a plumber and the unlikely face of Dior, is seen as “everything but a bourgeois” by the French fashion establishment — even as he’s flanked by Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Anna Wintour and is picketed for appropriating the aesthetic of homelessness in one of his shows.
The dizzying, meteoric highs of delivering yet another critically acclaimed runway production are followed by the lowest of lows and multiple-day benders. The staggering, unattainable beauty of the clothes, narratives and fantasies that Galliano creates is complicated by the market imperative for art to be commodified and accessible to the very people that keep fashion houses in business.
High & Low doesn’t offer easy, or even compelling, answers to the reasons and consequences of a public figure behaving in a morally objectionable way. Galliano is once again a working designer, this time for small but reputable fashion house Maison Margiela, and he staged a hyperbolically received couture show in January.
In Galliano, Macdonald has a theatrical, animated subject who’s incredibly adept at narrativising his own life. But he also has an unreliable narrator whose testimonies are directly at odds with the word of many people who surrounded him at key junctures of his life.
Right at the start of High & Low, Galliano boldly utters, “I am going to tell you everything”, but in truth, he doesn’t tell us much – whether due to inability or unwillingness is unclear.
The coterie of high-profile models and tastemakers who stand by him attribute his anti-Semitism to his illness, to his addiction. Sidney Toledano, the Jewish chief executive of Dior at the time, muses that it may be because of his Catholic upbringing. Galliano himself doesn’t know, and scarcely remembers two of the three inciting incidents.
Washington Post critic Robin Givhan doesn’t have an answer, but comes closest to articulating the consequences, or lack thereof, when people including Galliano behave objectionably: “He’s a white man.”
There are some pressing questions around Galliano: Does creative genius exempt moral shortcomings? Can we, should we, separate the art from the artist? Should people get second chances (or in Galliano’s case, fourth chances)? And who gets to decide who deserves a second chance?
Unfortunately, High & Low skirts around them all.
High & Low — John Galliano is in cinemas from May 30.