The rise and fall and rise again of John Galliano
We were always fans of John Galliano’s work, so when news came in 2011 about his antisemitic rants in a Paris bar, we were quite disappointed and hoping that the fallout would not be as devastating. But with social media and cancel culture, there didn’t seem much chance for him to regain his previous stature… until recently when his Spring Artisanal 2024 show for Maison Margiela made headlines as his comeback. But did it really redeem him?
The designer always courted controversy. Growing up in the ’60s in South London after moving from Gibraltar, where he was born to a father of Italian descent and a Spanish mother, he had a strict Catholic upbringing that did not bode well for his nascent sexuality, being beaten up by both his parents when he remarked how another man looked gorgeous. He was nevertheless close to his mother, a Spanish flamenco teacher who often dressed him and his sisters in elaborate outfits.
It was his enrollment at Central Saint Martins that found him in the company of his kind: queer, irreverent art school students who defined the ’80s era of unbridled creativity and excess.
His 1984 graduation collection, Les Incroyables, was a legendary triumph. Inspired by youths in post-Revolutionary France, it expressed the sentiment of his tribe called the New Romantics, ahead of its time for its gender fluidity and eccentricity, rebelling against the nihilism of punk by dressing more lavishly and decoratively, just like the Incroyables who were part of the vanishing aristocracy and staunch royalists who went against the egalitarian stance of the revolutionaries.
Galliano set a new trajectory for fashion and made a name as he established his eponymous label known for innovation and weaving stories, as well as for shock value: His first major show in 1985, with London’s kings and queens meeting forest nymphs sprouting leaves from their heads, ended with a model throwing fresh mackerel at the audience.
Shows followed in London, then Paris, till the early 1990s when he met the socialite Sao Schlumberger through Vogue’s Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley and was able to mount his career-making AW1994 collection at her mansion—a suite of black satin bias-cut dresses that made slip dresses all the rage for that decade.
Soon enough, he was hired for Givenchy to become the first British designer to lead a French couture house, debuting in 1996 with an enchanting mix of sumptuous bouffant gowns and dresses with elegant bows. It solidified his reputation as a designer and storyteller, redefining what fashion can convey, through inventive designs and theatrical presentations.
He reached his apex when he ascended to Dior, where his designs became more lavish, weaving historical detail with unbridled fantasy, setting new benchmarks for what fashion could achieve, from his Egyptian queens and ancient regime princesses to Japanese geishas.
He would still cause disruption, like with his 2000 clochard show inspired by the homeless, with clothes resembling piles of newspapers and accessories of found objects. It ignited accusations of indifference to social problems, to which he replied, “I just thought the clothes were beautiful.”
From 1996 to the 2000s, he was at the forefront of a phenomenal transformation of fashion into a pop-cultural juggernaut. To mark the 10th anniversary of his tenure with Dior and the house’s 60th birthday, Galliano presented one of his most ambitious collections in Bal des Artistes, held in the Orangerie at Versailles, a most extravagant display of debauchery.
As he became Paris’ king of fashion, there was also a downward spiral with booze and drugs. He became notorious for trashing hotel suites. The DJ Jeremy Healy, the designer’s longtime friend, related that around 20 hotels banned him for causing mayhem, including an incident at the Ritz where he was naked inside the lift for four hours, imagining he was a lion, growling and crawling at whoever wanted to use it. The privileges of his position and attendant excesses isolated him from reality—he actually required up to six people just to light a cigarette and didn’t know how to use an ATM. His assistants had assistants.
With the pressure to produce a dizzying number of 32 collections per year, Galliano’s breakdown was no surprise. “I was committing suicide slowly,” Galliano recalls while acknowledging how fellow Brit designer Alexander McQueen underwent the same fate and actually took his own life.
Shortly before he was set to debut his final collection for Dior in February 2011, Galliano was summoned by LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, who warned that if he didn’t stop drinking, he would die, to which the then gym-obsessed designer replied, while opening his shirt to reveal a ripped torso, “Does this look like the body of an alcoholic?”
And so, the drinking and pill-popping continued until that fateful day when he made antisemitic remarks at clients at Le Perle Bar in Paris’ Jewish quarter. A second video, filmed months earlier, further incriminated him as he declared, “I love Hitler.”
Fired by Dior and disgraced in the global press, he was found guilty in court for racism, paid a fine and decamped to a remote location for solace. As penance, he met with Jews, including a rabbi and a holocaust survivor to help in his reform.
His hope to get a second chance came slowly, first with Oscar de la Renta hiring him as artist in residence in 2013 before being installed as creative director of Maison Margiela the following year.
He was relatively quiet at Margiela until the recent Spring Artisanal show, which was acclaimed with the headline “Galliano is back,” bringing his trademark fantasy to make the world dream again. After that, he even figured prominently at the Met Gala, dressing many of the celebrities, and taking part in the recent Vogue World show in Paris to celebrate the Olympics, seated prominently beside Anna Wintour.
The Vogue editor has been his staunch ally ever since and even considered a Galliano retrospective for the Met Gala theme but in the end, the museum’s leadership feared public backlash and placed the planned exhibit on indefinite pause. It seems that even if the fashion industry’s memory may be short and can forgive wrongdoing, past transgressions can still haunt you somehow and prevent you from fully moving on.