There’s a little hidden park, Le Jardin des Rosiers–Joseph-Migneret, in the heart of the Marais in Paris. The secluded spot takes its name from the principal of a local elementary school, who—after witnessing the roundup of 165 of his Jewish students in 1942—committed himself to the anti-Nazi resistance and scrambled to keep as many other young people from the gas chambers as he could. “N’oubliez pas!” commands a plaque in the park. “Do not forget!”
A leisurely 10-minute stroll away from Le Jardin des Rosiers–Joseph-Migneret, you will find La Perle, a hip brasserie with outdoor tables jammed up against one another in the classic Parisian manner. People go there to be seen, and one night in 2011 what onlookers saw was a man insulting the couple beside him, saying, among other choice phrases, “I love Hitler,” and “People like you would be dead—your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Someone recorded the rant with his phone. It’s an upsetting video: Upsetting because of what the man is saying—noxious, shocking things—and upsetting, too, because the man saying them is drunk beyond proper cognition, eyes dim, slurring his words. This man, of course, is John Galliano, creative director of Dior at the time and, by general consensus, one of the world’s great fashion designers, acclaimed for his theatrical magpie vision and the maximalist joie de vivre of his clothes. How did this person, so affirming of life’s splendid variety in his art, find himself in such an abject state, giving voice to such hate?
That is the question at the heart of High & Low: John Galliano, Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary. Produced in association with Condé Nast Entertainment and grounded in probing interviews with Galliano himself—as well as with confidants including Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss and former colleagues such as LVMH executive Sidney Toledano—the film seeks neither to absolve nor to condemn. Rather, it serves as a robust examination of a complex, contradictory character. “It’s a kind of detective story,” says Macdonald. “Me trying to figure this man out: the world he comes out of, the experiences that shaped him, what’s going on in his head. But if you watch the movie, you see that John’s trying to figure that out too. In some ways, he’s a mystery to himself.”
By his own admission, Macdonald “isn’t a fashion person.” British, and a bit younger than his subject, he was aware of Galliano as a figure in the zeitgeist, the prodigy–enfant terrible who shot from working-class obscurity in south London to the apex of fashion, becoming the first designer from the UK to take the reins at a Parisian couture house. One pleasure of making the film, Macdonald says, was acquainting himself with Galliano’s work—its synthesis of rich storytelling, far-flung references, and dazzling craft. High & Low gives Galliano his full measure as an artist. “But then there’s that video,” adds Macdonald, who previously directed the documentary One Day in September, about the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. “And it’s repellent.”
“I’ve got relatives who died in the Holocaust,” he continues. “But I, personally, like John, and I think he’s a genius. I also know he’s an addict—and so what I see, too, in that video, is a man who’s destroying himself.”
The film’s point of view is kaleidoscopic, its narrative juxtaposing the ecstasy of creation, the insane pressure of heading a global luxury brand as the fashion industry was speeding up, and the demons left over from an often cruel and closeted childhood. (One can trace these same arcs in Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary career and ultimately tragic life.) The key juxtaposition in High & Low, though, is between the scourge of antisemitism and the scourge of addiction. One theory offered for Galliano’s remarks at La Perle—put forward by an addiction psychiatrist who worked with Galliano during his recovery—is that, by planting himself in a public spot in one of Paris’s historically Jewish neighborhoods and saying things like “I love Hitler,” he was committing “social suicide.” If that was the subconscious plan, it worked: When the video emerged, Galliano was pilloried in the international press, sacked from both Dior and his LVMH-owned namesake label, and cast into exile—canceled, as we say nowadays. Then, controversially, he came back. In 2014, John Galliano, clean and sober, was appointed creative director of Maison Margiela, and his collections continue to earn critical acclaim.
“What do you do with someone like John Galliano? What I like to say is, ‘We don’t do cancel culture—we do counsel culture,’ ” notes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. (Greenblatt’s predecessor in that role, Abe Foxman, decried Galliano’s comments before offering him guidance on making amends.) “I do think there’s a difference between someone who’s not in control of himself saying those things—and maybe not even understanding why he’s saying them—and what we’re seeing now, which is famous people, people in positions of power, going on social media and broadcasting their antisemitic views to a global audience,” Greenblatt continues. “And one difference is that in 2011, the public response was overwhelming—this behavior is abnormal; it’s not acceptable. What you see in the film is that John understood that, and that he’s gone on to learn and to become a better person.”
Macdonald leaves it to viewers to judge the sincerity of Galliano’s attitude shift. Some may choose to believe him when he says, in the film, “It was a disgusting thing, a foul thing, that I did…. It was just horrific.” Others may remain in doubt. Watching the film, Galliano still seems taken aback by the fact that the man slurring those vicious words is actually him. But that’s the thing about addiction: People become unrecognizable to themselves. Accountability requires reckoning with mistakes you don’t remember making.
In another era, Galliano’s rants might have drifted off into the Paris night, remembered only by the customers at La Perle who heard them. But by 2011, there were plenty of video-enabled smartphones around, and we’d just entered the social media echo chamber. The takedown of John Galliano was an early example of the power of these technologies to gin up an outrage machine. Now, of course, it’s all outrage, all the time—and in another accident of timing, High & Low is coming out at a particularly fraught moment. Whether you define the term broadly or narrowly, antisemitism is more visible now than it has been for many years. It feels less “abnormal,” as Greenblatt puts it. Macdonald, though, didn’t intend his documentary to play into debates over, say, the conflict in the Middle East, or what constitutes bigotry. He was interested in questions raised by Galliano’s story about what to do about bigots: When to punish, when to forgive. “At the start, I thought, Well—Galliano is an interesting way of talking about cancel culture,” he recalls. “But I gave that up pretty quickly. There are so many layers to John, and I realized that it was much more interesting just to tell the story of the man.
“And John was incredibly open,” Macdonald continues. “He was allowed to look at cuts of the film, and there’s stuff that must have been hard for him to watch, but he didn’t object to anything—or, actually, he had two notes: One was that I’d said something was ‘couture’ when it was ‘prêt-à-porter,’ and he wanted that corrected. And the other was: He didn’t want the film to be depressing—not for his own sake, but for other addicts. I think the way he looks at La Perle is that while it’s the thing that destroyed his life, it also saved his life. Whatever else people take from the film, that’s what he wants people to see—that there is life on the other side.”