Director: Kevin Macdonald
He sent Kate Moss down her first runway, created the bias cut and generated a trend for slip dresses which have come back into fashion, yet John Galliano remains one of fashion’s most divisive figures. Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary High and Low – John Galliano, screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023, asks whether forgiveness is really possible, can we separate art from the artist following his Anti-Semitic outbursts in 2011, and has the fashion industry properly reflected on his actions?
Applying a semi-chronological structure that tries to tell some of the story of Galliano’s life and career from his time at Central St Martins to his role at the head of Givenchy and Dior. The film that Macdonald constructs though is not a straightforward application of the high and low of the title, not just a rise and fall, attempted redemption narrative and instead this documentary notes the ways in which Galliano’s designs incorporated high and low art in ways that were revolutionary at a French fashion house led by a British designer, as well as the challenges of addiction and diva behaviour that dogged his career long before those three fateful nights in Paris in 2011.
The psychology of Galliano is one of Macdonald’s key interests, but it is a problem the film is never able to solve. The director has unprecedented access to the designer who is interviewed openly and given every opportunity to discuss his career, his background and the aftermath of his encounters with the public that changed the course of his life. But whether Gallino truly cannot remember the incidents – and he certainly makes a good show of thinking it happened once rather than three times – or is putting on a performance of public shame for the camera is harder to discern.
Whether Macdonald believes it is even harder to ascertain; his film cuts Galliano’s explanations with other talking heads from victims and co-workers who insist he never apologised and, despite penance, went on to reoffend with a poor outfit choice that even has his agent sighing in disbelief a decade on.
But his fashion and film friends are far keener to believe that Galliano has an illness, an addiction that his genius and his influence on fashion makes forgivable. Kate Moss, Charlize Theron, Naomi Campbell, Anna Wintour, Edward Enninful and more are keen to stress Galliano’s importance, Campbell has never even seen the videos she claims, but knows the accusations and the subsequent disgrace are unfounded, not the man she knows. Macdonald presents these without commentary, allowing Galliano’s own sometimes strange responses and inability to see himself clearly even now say so much more.
High and Low – Galliano is a documentary that is full of questions, and like Macdonald’s previous work on Whitney Houston and Vogue itself, lets the material speak, collecting voices, opinions and archived interviews as well as fashion show clips and backstage footage that provide the audience with another perspective on a fractured and unknowable figure buried in the fantasies he creates. Who Galliano really is and whether fashion will forgive is lost in the continuous mystery of the man himself.
High and Low – John Galliano is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
