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Kevin Macdonald’s moving 2018 biodoc, Whitney, has done an outstanding job of cementing Whitney Houston’s legacy while sweeping away the slander of the rapacious celebrity culture that mocked one of contemporary pop’s most exceptional talents during the worst and most public period of her drug addiction. Another “price of fame” subject, disgraced British fashion designer John Galliano, is a trickier prospect that does the director no favors.
If you come to this movie looking for a concise overview of his couture achievements, you just might find it High Low more than useful. Show footage, especially from Galliano’s extensive tenure as creative director at Dior, makes for fantastic clothing porn, highlighting the haute theatricality and ravishing romance that made him a fashion rock star. But if you’re anticipating the final conclusion of the redemption tour, you’re unlikely to find this a convincing argument for separating the art from the a-hole.
High and Low: John Galliano
It comes down to
Annoyingly unsatisfactory.
That’s a problem when the film is framed by the anti-Semitic and racist diatribe (actually one of three reported incidents) that landed Galliano in legal trouble in France and derailed his career for a while; and by vociferous claims by virtually everyone that his two years of exile constitute an atonement. It is much talked about, but Galliano’s unsympathetic attitude shows little evidence in the interviews for which he is included. High Low to suggest much more than lip service.
Macdonald is generally not an imprecise non-fiction filmmaker, but while viewing this document the question arises whether he agrees with Fashion artists like Anna Wintour, Jonathan Newhouse and the late André Leon Talley, who are lobbying for Galliano’s forgiveness – Condé Nast Entertainment is an associate producer, in case the blessing needed to be even more obvious – or that he gives the abrasively unpleasant Galliano enough rope to himself to hang. Whatever this critic does.
Talking about reconciliation doesn’t mean much when you show so little humility or self-blame. Galliano puts much more emphasis on the shame he’s had to live with and the effort involved in putting out more than thirty collections a year that fueled his drug and alcohol addiction, suggesting that the spewing of hate mongering is no surprise given his condition at the time. Certainly.
The burnout story of impossible artistic demands – underlined throughout with excerpts from The red shoes – is practically a subgenre within the wider field of fashion documentation. Recent films about Halston and Alexander McQueen tell similar stories, the latter tragically culminating in substance abuse, depression and, among other factors, suicide. But not a drunken torrent of pro-Hitler rhetoric. (The 2018 document, simply titled McQueenis excellent.)
Galliano’s anti-Asian remarks received less press coverage, although they came up in an interview with Philippe Virgitti, the only person represented here who was on the receiving end of the designer’s beating at Café La Perle in Paris. Virgitti reveals the lasting pain of his exposure in the media and French legal system as a result of the incident. And while Galliano claims he’s apologized in court, Virgitti insists he hasn’t.
Does Galliano sincerely regret his admitted ugly behavior or is he just sorry, which is something else? That’s a question Macdonald’s doctor implicitly asks, leaving the answer open to interpretation. To the filmmaker’s credit, High Low never pretends to be an endorsement of Galliano, but instead a contextualization of the main incident and the fashion world’s muddled response to it.
There’s an endless plea for forgiveness from friends and professional colleagues like Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss, and what appears to be selfish advocacy from fashion arbiters like Wintour et al. about how the field needs Galliano’s genius, his knack for drama. Should we overlook toxic bigotry so celebrities can wear something cool to the Met Gala?
One of the more thoughtful commentators here is Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion editor and writer Robin Givhan, who reasons that it is conceivable to believe in the possibility of a second chance. And that Galliano’s tirades were unforgivable. Though Givhan, who is black, when considering certain factors in his redemption, drops the fraught distinction: “He’s a white man.”
Condé Nast Chairman and Fashion publisher Newhouse was one of the key power players involved in rebooting Galliano’s career, going into outreach mode with Jewish leaders until he found a rabbi willing to set up a special course in Holocaust education for the designer, who reportedly had very little knowledge of that dark chapter. in history. Serious? He knew enough to say to (non-Jewish) people quietly sipping drinks in the Marais: “Your mothers and your ancestors would all be gassed.”
Following the uneducated theory, commentary surrounds some of Galliano’s spectacular Dior shows, with garments inspired by travels to Yemen, China, Egypt and other destinations. While the thought police might now call part of this cultural appropriation, the argument is made that Galliano is an artistic magpie who had only a superficial understanding of the cultures he sampled.
Witness the astonishing blunder that nipped his first comeback in 2013, with an Oscar de la Renta residency, brokered by Wintour. A photo of Galliano attending a fashion house show showed him dressed in counterfeit Hasidic clothing, which is not the ideal look for someone infected with anti-Semitism.
The outrage sparked by his shabby-chic collection for Dior in the spring/summer of 2000, Les Clochards, seen as a slap in the face to the Parisian homeless population, is another example. As with most of Galliano’s creations, the clothing itself was radically original, even if the concept would become a joke a year later with the satirical ‘Derelicte’ collection in zoolander.
At times there seems to be an almost tacit suggestion of Twinkie defense: “John’s not very smart, so let’s cut him some slack, because he’s a huge talent.”
One of the more substantive angles – by far the most poignant part of the document – is the emotional distress caused by the 2007 drug overdose death of Steven Robinson, Galliano’s close friend and longtime right-hand man at Dior. Robinson’s story is the sad tale of an artist who may have had the talent to become a designer star, but lacked the confidence of the public.
Galliano himself doesn’t downplay the reasons he got into trouble, but he leans on the blackout excuse to claim he has no recollection of the incidents. What’s even more disturbing is that when Macdonald — who is by no means limited to softball questions — asks the designer to speculate on the root of his anti-Semitic vitriol, he more or less shrugs. Others, including Jewish intellectuals, point to his Andalusian Catholic family origins as a background in which Jews were widely maligned as “Christ killers.” His working-class upbringing in South London is also discussed.
Together with The red shoesThe other major motif that recurs throughout is Napoleon, most notably in Abel Gance’s 1927 silent film, one of the sources of inspiration for Les Incroyables, Galliano’s 1984 graduation collection at Central Saint Martins themed around the French Revolution, which put him right on London’s fashion map. As an iconic shorthand for unchecked ego, Napoleon is an effective symbol. Galliano even wore a Bonaparte bicorne several times, so it’s not an allusion he shied away from. Egomania and appeasement are not the most compatible bedfellows, it turns out.
The film ends with Galliano’s 2022 show for Maison Margiela, paving the way for his second comeback, where he has been creative director since 2014 and spends less time in the public eye. Titled Cinema Inferno, the show is staged under movie screens with a searing melodrama with autobiographical elements – and some truly terrible dialogue and acting. At the end, Galliano paces excitedly back and forth, then flees up a flight of stairs to an empty studio, exhausted and exhausted, which is his usual state after the launch of a collection, both before and after. he got clean.
There is no doubt that being an artist in a highly competitive commercial luxury sector demands a lot from a person. But that factor also contributes to the queasy feeling High Low that the subject is determined less by humble contrition than by self-pitying martyrdom. And that’s what makes this provocative yet uncomfortable movie leave a sour taste in the mouth.