HIGH & LOW: JOHN GALLIANO Rated: Running time: Where to watch:
By the time the documentary “High & Low: John Galliano” enters its second hour, you have learned a little about its titular subject’s life. You’ve seen him at work and at play, and you’ve also watched his 2011 drunken antisemitic rant — “I love Hitler” — which was captured on video. You’ve learned about his childhood in England, his time studying fashion in school, his habit of indulging to excess. Mostly, you have witnessed the unfolding of one of the most exalted careers in high fashion, a decadeslong spectacle filled with sensational designs, leggy beauties and air kisses, all set to the drone of millions upon millions of dollars in annual sales.
An hour into this fabulousness, I scribbled: “don’t see how this explains his hateful comments.” When the second and final hour ended, I had learned that Galliano’s father could be violent toward his son and that the designer’s career had been stressful; although, of course, many people with bad parents and hard jobs don’t spew hate, even in the grip of serious addiction. In truth, I didn’t need an explanation. I just wanted something — even a glimmer — that shed light on why on three occasions in 2010 and 2011, he had voiced virulent prejudice. I also wondered what he said when he wasn’t on camera, a question this movie never broaches.
Director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative. In the main, it is a familiar portrait, one that Macdonald has assembled using archival and original material, including far too many clips from Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, “Napoléon,” a Galliano fixation. He started his label in the mid-1980s, was named the designer at Givenchy the next decade and moved to Dior in 1996, a trajectory from punk upstart to acclaimed visionary and international brand that paralleled the steep rise in the global stakes of the luxury fashion industry.
As interviewees chatter and declaim, Macdonald regularly cuts to runway imagery, which is certainly more enjoyable than enduring Galliano’s prejudices. The clothes invariably pop. The shapes, lines, colors and textures are as wildly divergent as are the designer’s sometimes eyebrow-raising ideas and influences, including his “Empress Josephine Meets Lolita” collection in 1992 and the Dior show in 2000 inspired by Paris’ unhoused people. There’s a surfeit of beauty, although the visual quality of the archival material is suboptimal until the shift to digital. Disappointingly, there are few specifics about the money and especially the labor — Galliano’s or that of the technicians who help realize his vision — needed to make these clothes.
Galliano’s fall happened swiftly. On Feb. 25, 2011, Dior suspended him after an incident at a Paris cafe initially described as a drunken tussle. “There was never the slightest comment of a racist or antisemitic connotation,” his lawyer, Stéphane Zerbib, told The New York Times at that point. Then the video surfaced in which Galliano railed at patrons, claiming to love Hitler and saying, “people like you would be dead today” and “your mothers, your forefathers” would be “gassed.” That March 1, Dior fired him. That September, a French tribunal convicted him in connection with two incidents, including another cafe rant in which he employed hate speech aimed at Asian and Jewish people. He was given a suspended fine.
Galliano first sat down in person with Macdonald in 2021, years after he had been condemned, punished and quickly, at times enthusiastically, not rated
116 minutes in theaters
forgiven. After the rants, he went into rehab, met with Jewish leaders, made public amends and resumed work, all of which is dutifully documented here. In 2014, he was named creative director of Maison Martin Margiela. The reception for his debut Margiela collection in 2015 was glowing; a number of reviews for his show this past January were delirious. “The John Galliano Show My Generation Has Been Waiting For,” ran a headline in Vogue.com. Socalled cancel culture is no match for capitalism.
The Vogue connection is an intriguing, er, thread. In 1994, Galliano’s struggling career was boosted by Vogue journalist André Leon Talley and by its editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, a Galliano supporter and currently chief content officer and global editorial director for Condé Nast. After Galliano’s rants, Jonathan Newhouse, its board chief, arranged meetings between the designer and Jewish leaders, as he explains in “High & Low,” which was coproduced by Condé Nast Entertainment. (Mark Guiducci, another Vogue executive, is its consulting producer.) It seems that the Guardian writer who in 2011 doubted whether Galliano would be able to “redeem himself” in his field never worked in fashion.