by There’s an argument to be made that everything we need to hear from John Galliano, the subject of this intricate documentary portrait. After the once famous British fashion designer was filmed drinking booze, bitter and spewing an antisemitic tirade at strangers from his chosen corner seat in La Perle, his local bar in Paris, his legacy should be buried and attention the world of fashion should have moved on to other less radioactive figures. But, as the Washington Post journalist Robin Givhan says drily: “Fashion has a very short memory”, especially, she says, for well-connected white men with powerful friends.
After unknowingly taking the job of creative director at Dior in 2011, Galliano hit the ground running, first recovering from his alcohol and prescription drug addictions with a stint in rehab, then beginning the thorough, rigorous process of recovery to do. Within a few years, the designer was back and active in fashion, in a temporary residency with Oscar De La Renta brokered by Vogue editor-in-chief, chief content officer of Condé Nast and longtime Galliano supporter, Anna Wintour.
The choice to open the film with footage of Galliano’s now-famous racist joke puts his cards firmly on the table.
Condé Nast Entertainment is involved in this documentary directed by Kevin Macdonald (he is credited as one of the production companies) about the rise, fall and rehabilitation of Galliano. And given the business’s vested interest in the industry and its highly profitable maverick son, that’s surprising and refreshing. High & Low as nuanced and thoughtful as it is. Macdonald, whose previous films have included the fictional elements The Last King of Scotland and States of Play, and including their documentaries Relating to the Empty and Whitney, is not in the business of providing marketing-friendly whitewashes of Galliano’s damaging reputation. The choice to open the picture with a clip from Galliano’s now infamous phone footage, which looks like a cross between a pantomime dam and a toxic spill, racially taunting a group of women, and the cards are firmly laid on the table – this man. damaged, his repellent words – before exploring the how and why of the designer’s actions.
Macdonald is interested in more than just the man and his misbehavior: this is a film that tackles the theme of redemption in an era of destruction. Moreover, he points out that Galliano, between the ups and downs of his professional and personal life, has a close connection with the industry that adopted him. “It’s fashion,” says one interviewee. “John is a good metaphor.”
It wasn’t always like that. Speaking candidly to the camera, Galliano recalls a less glamorous childhood. Born in Gibraltar to a Spanish mother and a Gibraltarian father, he moved with his family to South London at the age of six. He knew, he says, early on that he was gay; he soon learned that this was not something his parents would take lightly, recalling beatings from his plumber father and verbal abuse from his mother.
Escape came through art – Galliano won a place at Central St Martins – and cinema. Macdonald seeds High & Low with clips from black-and-white films, with special emphasis on Abel Gance’s epic silent film, Napoleon, which inspired Galliano’s spectacular graduation show, Les Incroyables. It’s a bit misleading as a recurring motif, although both men had ambitions, who appreciated dramatic headgear and were both, in their time, silent Parisians; the comparison also suggests Galliano’s strategic brilliance, always more concerned with the surface impact of his decisions than their consequences, but there is little evidence of it.
Galliano’s genius – and a genius sprinkled as liberally as sequins by the film’s interviewees – is a word in his ability to create drama and beauty. His models didn’t just walk the runway; they played a role in the short stories with which he decorated each collection. And the models, for their part, appreciated it. It is no coincidence that Galliano’s rise coincided with the rise of supermodels and the fashion world’s explosion into a multi-billion dollar industry. A rich collection of archival footage captures the lightning-bottled thrill of Galliano’s exhibition-making, in designs and shows for his own label and those for Dior.
But the fashion industry is a ferocious beast, as the documentary Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettegui have already shown. McQueen, which makes for a poignant companion piece to this picture, is a world that exacerbates any pre-existing tendencies toward addictive or self-destructive behavior. Galliano survived; Tragically Alexander McQueen was not. And in both cases, you wonder if disasters could have been avoided if the industry had been more concerned about the mental health of these wonderfully troubled men, and less concerned about the millions they generated in revenue.
