RAW TAKE ON HIGHPROFILE LIFE
Director MacDonald’s ‘High & Low John Galliano’ offers a thoughtful examination of the high intensity fashion world and cancel culture.
At first glance the idea of a feature documentary about the life, undeniable genius and spectacular fall from grace of fashion’s once untouchable golden child John Galliano seems like a terrible idea. After his much publicised sacking by Dior in 2011, following the release of a viral video in which the designer, looking like a melting pantomime clown, delivered a vicious antisemitic tirade, there didn’t seem much more that needed to be said about a man who was clearly unlikeable, unloved and irredeemable.
But Scottish, Oscar-winning director Kevin MacDonald — Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland and Marley — isn’t the kind of filmmaker to produce a hagiography, even if one of the film’s producers is US media giant Condé Nast, whose most powerful and globally feared employee, content editor Anna Wintour, has been behind Galliano’s post2011 return. After a much-needed stint in rehab for drug and alcohol addiction, Galliano has returned to something resembling his former glory.
MacDonald makes his intentions clear from the opening of his documentary — beginning with the shaky phone camera footage of the notorious incident that should have ended Galliano’s career, before taking a layered and detailed look at the environment and personal history that shaped him. He was the son of an abusive plumber father and an abused, bitter Gibraltarian mother. A St Martin’s college graduate superstar and shining king of 21st century high fashion.
Using candid interviews with Galliano himself, testaments to his genius from a slew of international superstar friends and a rich archive of his many gamechanging experiments on the catwalk, MacDonald deftly paints a picture of a man who came to epitomise high fashion’s battle between art and commerce.
MacDonald’s film offers a thoughtful examination not only of it subject, but also of the broader fashion world at large and the high stakes at play in the increasingly tense world of cancel culture.
While it may not leave you liking Galliano by its conclusion, it will certainly leave you understanding more about him and the world he once ruled over.