Issue 13: Making Way for the Comeback of John Galliano

Two years after his fall from grace, John Galliano told his story and Vanity Fair was eager to listen.

(Content warning: This piece contains descriptions of anti-Semitic abuse and harassment.)

At this year’s Met Gala, one of the most prominently featured brands was Maison Margiela. The event's co-host Zendaya looked stunning in a Margiela look, as did the likes of Bad Bunny and Gwendoline Christie (pour one out for Kim Kardashian's ribcage.) It seemed to be the perfect meeting of theme and designer, especially in a year where the dress code was confusing at best.

The French luxury fashion house was founded in 1988 and was instantly acclaimed for its haute-couture looks. The eponymous Martin Margiela resigned as creative director in 2009, to much speculation from the fashion press. There were concerns that the brand would lose its provocative edge as they planned to move forward without a new leader. That changed five years later when they announced the hiring of John Galliano. He was beloved in the fashion world, having made iconic works under the names of Dior, Givenchy, and his own line.  Since then, Margiela has, by all accounts, flourished under Galliano's reign. This year alone, their couture presentation for the 2024 Spring/Summer line went viral thanks to Pat McGrath's porcelain doll makeup designs. In his review for WWD, Miles Socha said that the collection "will surely be remembered in history books, collected by museums, pored over by design students."

Galliano remains a beloved son of the fashion world, a hugely influential figure and one of the industry’s favourites. Only 13 years prior, he became persona non grata after a vile racist rant went viral, but it also took a mere two years for the business to help lay the groundwork for his comeback. It takes a village to un-cancel an accused anti-Semite.

Vanity Fair. "Galliano in the Wilderness." June 16, 2013. Ingrid Sischy.

(Image via VF.com)

First, the facts. The website of the British tabloid The Sun posted a video on February 28, 2011, in which Galliano could be heard saying "I love Hitler" towards a group of Jewish women in a bar in Paris. He went on, calling them ugly and saying that "People like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed, and f*cking dead.” A few days prior, he had verbally attacked Géraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, mocking Bloch's appearance and then hurling further bigoted insults at them. He called Bloch a "dirty Jewish face" who should be dead and Virgitti a "f*cking Asian b*stard."

In France, the expression of antisemitism is illegal, and Galliano was put on trial. In September 8^th of that year, he was found guilty and sentenced to a total of €6,000 in suspended fines. His legal team claimed that he had made the "outbursts" because of "work-related stress and multiple addictions." This came after he had filed a defamation lawsuit against those accusing him of antisemitism. On March 1^st, Dior sacked Galliano.

These details are shared in the opening of this Vanity Fair piece, but with softening language and rhetoric that seems designed to downplay what happened. We’re supposed to be shocked that a genius like Galliano would be a proud public bigot on multiple occasions. It’s meant to be a tragedy that such a brilliant mind would allow the world to sweep him along into calling a woman a “dirty Jewish face.”

It's not that I’m necessarily surprised by how much this piece bends over backward to portray Galliano as a tragic figure and victim of circumstance. Pieces like this exist to smudge away the more problematic aspects of their subject’s lives. Yet I was shocked by how much my stomach churned reading Sischy’s barely veiled PR gloss for a man who screamed “I love Hitler” at a group of Jewish women (Sischy herself is Jewish.) To read her version of events is to see the abuser become the most helpless victim this side of a fish pulled from the water by a hook. She calls his initial apology "abject if nuanced" to describe his denial of certain claims made against him that were true. His behaviour "was more complicated than a “normal” hate criminal’s." Him getting a fine and not a jail sentence isn't viewed as a sign of celebrity privilege but of him not being like all those other antisemites.

(From a 1996 story in Vanity Fair.)

A big focus of this piece – really, the true one – is Galliano’s history of drug and alcohol abuse and how it impacted him in this moment of casual hate criming. He was exceedingly drunk and had also used enough barbiturates to essentially poison himself. His "first act" as a young English boy with a Spanish father who dealt with homophobic abuse and found solace in fashion is detailed. His life was an interesting one, with many stories of dressing actors for the West End stage, partying with Leigh Bowery, and having Diana Ross as his first customer.

His specialness as a designer is, of course, emphasized. His clothes "always had an implicit story, a beyond-just-spectacle theatricality in which Galliano invested each garment with the sense it had been designed not for some abstract size 4 but for an actual, specific woman, a character drawn from history, art, culture, or his imagination—sometimes all at once." Both André Leon Talley and Anna Wintour threw their clout behind him when he was living hand-to-mouth in Paris. His runways were capital-E Events, featuring "models of all shapes, heights, sizes, colors, ages, and ethnic origins. Giants and dwarfs welcome." Vanity Fair want you to know how decidedly un-Nazi his work was. See, how could he truly be antisemitic when he put curvy women on the catwalk?

Galliano's rise in the fashion world, leading to both his own brand and his time as creative director of Christian Dior, is lavishly described. Sischy is proudly florid with her language choices throughout, as if eager to match Galliano's designs, which rejected minimalism as if their lives depended on it. "All this success masked a growing problem: Galliano had become a highly functioning addict, relying on an almost lethal mix of alcohol and pills to stay on top of his game," she writes. Addiction and the fashion world are harsh partners, as many models can attest to. Certainly, the seemingly inescapable spiral of drug dependency is starkly described here. Galliano talks about using booze to "crash after the collections" but then overwork drove him to pills to stay awake, then more pills to sleep, then vodka or red wine on top to quiet his mind. It felt like a natural fit for his public image as a dilletante performer with a team following behind to do every minute task on his behalf. It led to him blacking out for days on end, going missing, and being covered in sores.

After the antisemitic attack, his friends and collaborators rallied around him to make sure he got help. Naomi Campbell got him to rehab. Linda Evangelista was his sole visitor in his first weekend. The Dior runway of the season went on without him. He says he didn't entirely understand the gravity of what had just happened.

We never truly understand how Galliano, in that moment, immediately latched onto antisemitism and racism as a way to attack these people. Galliano doesn’t seem sure of where it came from either. It seems worth interrogating and it feels like nobody really has. Is it now so inconsequential to his story, or to the fashion industry’s? In the Vanity Fair profile, Sischy offers a weird possible explanation, speculating that his then-ongoing research into the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who was a notorious antisemite, may have "got scrambled and twisted as all the chemicals in Galliano’s body were affecting his brain." It's a moment so laughable that I'm surprised the editor kept it in.

(From a 1994 VF piece.)

Galliano says, “It’s the worst thing I have said in my life, but I didn't mean it. I have been trying to find out why that anger was directed at this race. I now realize I was so fucking angry and so discontent with myself that I just said the most spiteful thing I could." Is that a good enough explanation? No, in large part because it’s the default one for so many. You say something cruel out of spite and often you don’t mean it but to immediately dig through your brain and settle on antisemitic and anti-Asian racism is not necessarily the same thing. Telling someone you love that you hate them in a moment of fury doesn’t equate engaging in a hate crime while you’re high.

Sischy does talk to some addiction experts and asks if there is some truth to that old idea that inebriation brings to light the deepest kept secrets and bigotries we try to conceal. An addiction specialist tells her that, while there is some truth to this, it's not that simple. "Let’s say Mr. Galliano—who I have never met and never treated—was coming into a bar and saw Hasidic people. That could have triggered something. That does not mean he is an anti-Semite. He certainly could be anti-Semitic, but he may also love Jewish people. The thing to know is that in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, alcohol dependence is under the rubric of being a mental illness. Pills can cause the same thing—the brain is going, to use a layman’s term, haywire.”

It harkens back to an earlier line in the piece, where Sischy says, of the incident, that Galliano "was in the acute stages of an untreated disease that millions of others suffer from has engendered sympathy in some quarters." It’s true. Addiction is a disease, one often denied such a status because it’s easier and more societally convenient to decry addicts as moral failures than ones of medical peril. John Galliano is an addict, one who committed a hate crime in the midst of a drug and booze-induced spiral. He had friends in his corner ready to get him help, and he also had an entire industry ready to bolster him back to his prime the moment the dust settled. Within weeks of his sacking from Dior, his friend Kate Moss asked him to design her wedding dress.

Jonathan Newhouse, chairman and C.E.O. of Condé Nast International (part of the company that owns Vanity Fair, as the piece notes), worked on community outreach to have Galliano talk to actual Jewish people and learn their history. If there's one thing to give Galliano actual credit for, it's his legwork in doing something more restorative than offering a mere "I'm sorry" statement to the press. Not everyone accepted. Gilles Bernheim, the chief rabbi of France, rejected requests to meet with him, according to Sischy. But plenty welcomed him, including London-based Rabbis who invited him to local services to meet with attendees.

Lots of industry people are quoted here in support of Galliano, including Wintour, Oscar de la Renta, and Elton John. “We need the dreamers," says Wintour. "Galliano’s trial should be over. Now it’s time for him to get out the scissors. And ribbons," concludes the piece. You could probably add "and then everyone clapped" to the end to capture the rhapsodic energy Sischy was hoping to achieve with the piece.

The fashion world has long rolled around in controversies and cover-ups of them. it made heroes of misogynists who openly degraded women and treated their core customer base like pure dirt. Dozens of models have come forward over the decades to talk about the hell of the industry, from encouraging disordered eating to straight-up sex trafficking and rape from powerful insider figures. While I was researching this piece, Alexander Wang began his comeback, with attendees to his most recent show including Kim Cattrall and Ice Spice. Designer Michaela Stark took to Instagram to call out how "fashion decided r*pists [are] cool again." Balenciaga got over its most recent controversy regarding fetishistic images of kids and allusions to child abuse pretty quickly with minimal damage to its brand. In February, a group of models sought union protections similar to what SAG-AFTRA gives its members. We've spent many years hearing stories of vulnerable women and girls in this industry being abused. Gérald Marie headed Elite Model Management for over three decades and it was an open secret that he was a serial predator. Criminal investigations into many of these allegations were dropped because France's statute of limitations for prosecution had passed.

There are many defenders of Galliano. They say he’s served his time, made his apologies, and moved on. Certainly, the fashion press almost never bring up the slurs in their near-universal praise for Margiela’s output. Everyone wears his clothes, from Cate Blanchett to Greta Gerwig to Hunter Schafer. It’s the least controversial thing in fashion to like a Galliano design, or to wear one at the biggest event of your life.

Recently, Galliano was the subject of a documentary, High & Low: John Galliano, directed by Kevin Macdonald. Galliano told Macdonald that he wasn’t doing the film to be forgiven, but rather to be “a little more understood." The reviews certainly seem sympathetic to him, if not necessarily all-forgiving. You can watch the film on MUBI and Amazon, and I do recommend it. At the very least, Galliano seems more like a person than in the Vanity Fair profile, where he’s practically a deity to the profiler. Propaganda of such nature obviously benefitted Galliano but it also made him seem less than human, oddly. He seems coddled by the journalist, not questioned.

If this profile drove anything home for me it’s the ways that “genius” are simultaneously defined as antithetical to cruelty and also totally justifying of it. How could such a brilliant man do something so awful, but also isn’t it kind of okay because they were so overburdened by the weight of their talent? Human beings are messy things. We can be brilliant and terrible at the same time, but historically and culturally speaking, we’re all too likely to fetishize this blend and excuse all abuse as a necessary means to an end. You want to enjoy Chinatown? You have to accept Polanski’s crimes. Nah. But we’ve all heard those arguments, right? I have to hear them all the damn time in my job. It’s not a privilege offered to everyone, but in a business defined by exploitation, it’s all inevitable in their eyes.

Not that I needed John Galliano to tell me that, although his story did reveal how low-demand and brief a timeframe the apology period truly is. It’s entirely up to you whether or not you think he’s done the work in atoning for his crime. He’s now clean and sober, has a good reputation among his peers, and there haven’t been any repeat incidents. Maybe it’s enough for some. I’m not Jewish so I can’t really comprehend the magnitude of this, especially at a time when antisemitism is rampant and hard-right political parties are dominating Europe, including in France. But it is hard to separate this one man from an entire system that cushioned the blows and carried him back to the top with barely a blink, seemingly more concerned with the clothes than the words.

I suppose that’s my exhausting conclusion to this piece. Forgiveness is a beautiful quality we should never be too cynical to celebrate, and yet it feels so intensely weaponized in a money and celebrity-driven world that we often shy away from our optimism. We’re also highly pessimistic about the ways that the rich and famous don’t seem to put in a fraction of the work to atone as everyone else is expected to. Two years in the wilderness before getting your Vanity Fair apology story feels shockingly brief in a way that the filled in explanations and details can’t soften. Most celebrities don’t apologize well. Did John Galliano do it well? Does it feel as tangible when everyone was already rushing to justify the crime before he could do the work? This is the quandary I struggle with. Galliano’s friends seemed to want what was best for him, and a hell of a lot more people just wanted him to shut up and sew (and for all of us to shut up full stop.)

Thanks for reading the latest issue of the Gossip Reading Club. You can find my work scattered around the internet. For Pajiba, I wrote about why the TV version of Daniel Molloy in Interview with the Vampire is better than the one in the books. I also wrote about Will Smith and the hottest image on the internet. For Inverse, I wrote about the very weird Mike Nichols werewolf movie Wolf, as well as the strange camp comedic remake of The Stepford Wives. For The Daily Beast, I wrote about Glen Powell and why “selling out” isn’t that bad when you’re good at it. For The AV Club, I wrote about the great animated movie battle of the Summer of 1999: Disney’s Tarzan versus the South Park movie. For Paste Books, I settled the “man vs. bear” internet debate with a classic Canadian novel where a woman f*cks a bear. For Primetimer, I wrote about one of my favourite one-season TV shows, the demon-hunting millennial horror-comedy Crazyhead.

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