He was swiftly removed from the fashion world after drunken, anti-Semitic rants, but now rumours — and a prominent presence at the Met Gala — suggest he may rise again.
The word around Paris is that John Galliano, the British fashion designer who was arrested in 2011 for a drunken public anti-Semitic tirade in the French capital, and was subsequently fired from his prestigious post as creative director of Christian Dior, as well as his namesake brand, maybe rehired by his former employer, Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury group LVMH Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton, and the world’s richest person.
To recap: in separate incidents more than a decade ago, Galliano was reported to have spewed anti-Semetic hate speech at Paris café patrons.
He was eventually found guilty of making public insults and given a suspended fine of €6,000 (approx. NZ$10,800).
He claims he remembers none of it.
Now, though Galliano has a solid job as creative director for the avant-garde Maison Margiela, a post he has held for 10 years, it is said among fashion cognoscenti that he may be brought back into the LVMH group. The various alleged scenarios include repossessing the John Galliano brand, which he founded in London in the 1980s, sold to LVMH in the 1990s and which currently lies practically dormant, or Givenchy, an LVMH-owned couture house, where Galliano got his big break in 1995, and which has been designer-less since January 1. “I’ve heard [he will go] for Celine,” says Robert Burke, founder of the New York retail consultancy Robert Burke and Associates, referring to yet another LVMH brand, which is reportedly about to lose its chief designer, Hedi Slimane.
Should Galliano finally be allowed to return from what he has described as his “exile”?
“It’s a complicated question,” Kathleen Law, an American tourist from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, pondered last week, as she visited La Galerie Dior, a wildly popular mini-museum at the company’s Paris headquarters, where the best of Galliano’s creations for the couture house are on show. “Same with Michael Jackson. Can you separate the art from the man?”
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Advertise with NZME.The rumours — for that’s all they are for the moment (LVMH declined to comment when approached about this story) — have not been born from the hopes of Galliano devotees.
For the past two years or so, there has been what appears to be carefully conceived and executed plan to publicly rehabilitate Galliano — most likely led by Arnault, and his longtime mentor Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue and chief content officer of its parent company, Condé Nast.
First, in October 2022, Galliano attended the inauguration of the Monet — Mitchell exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and posed for photographs with Wintour, Arnault, and former Dior chief executive Sidney Toledano — an image seen as the beginning of a rapprochement between Galliano and LVMH.
Then in January, Galliano garnered headlines for Maison Margiela worldwide when he mounted a spectacularly louche haute couture show under a Paris bridge, featuring models who resembled blow-up sex dolls. Galliano worked on the collection for 18 months (a time-luxury he would never be afforded at a mega maison).
Launchmetrics, fashion’s leading marketing platform and data analytics company, reports that the Margiela show created an astounding $18.5 million in Media Impact Value — a 90 per cent jump for the company — and ranking it fourth in the Haute Couture sphere, after stalwarts Dior, Schiaparelli and Chanel, respectively.
In March, High & Low: John Galliano, a feature-length documentary directed by Oscar-winning film-maker Kevin Macdonald, shepherded by Wintour, and produced by Macdonald and Chloe Mamelok in association with Condé Nast Entertainment, was released in the US and the UK. In it, Macdonald compares Galliano to fallen French emperor Napoleon I (one of Galliano’s style heroes) and gives the designer an inordinate amount of screen time to apologise directly to viewers for his appalling behaviour and explain why he fell into such a dark, drug-and-drink-infused abyss.
What are the benefits to returning Galliano to fashion’s pantheon? Glory and money. Wintour has championed Galliano since his debut in London in the mid-1980s and once declared that her favourite show of all time was Galliano’s in March 1994. She refers to him as “a great designer” and “a friend,” and would no doubt like to mount the defining retrospective of his work, and stage one of her famous Met Gala fundraisers in his honour. The exhibition Savage Beauty, a retrospective of Galliano’s peer Alexander McQueen in 2011, generated a minimum of $14.6 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Advertise with NZME.In fact, The Cut reported on Friday that, up until late last summer, the Costume Institute had planned to dedicate its 2024 exhibition, and the Met Gala due to take place on Monday night, to Galliano. But that has been put on “indefinite pause,” according to sources, the website stated. Instead, next week, the museum will open Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, a show spotlighting four centuries-worth of masterworks.
Such public and cultural reacceptance would allow Galliano to be celebrated in the fashion history books without issue. Arnault could trot out Galliano’s LVMH-owned archives in a revenue-generating manner without looking like a two-faced profiteer. The luxury industry as a whole could get a creative boost. As Wintour very recently said: “When John’s work soars, it lifts fashion higher.”
It’s certain that Galliano’s recent Maison Margiela couture show made the fashion community swoon over its dramatic presentation and its sexy, albeit misogynistic, silhouette. But in the nearly 15 years since Galliano was the King of Couture — a position he so believed, he once posed for a photograph by sitting on a throne and wearing a crown — fashion has moved on from his romantic style of dressing deeply rooted in history, and embraced modern concepts, such as sustainability, comfort, and empowerment. Good on You, a consumer-facing platform that rates fashion brands on their environmental impact, rates Maison Margiela “very poor”.
Young designers — most especially graduates of Galliano’s alma mater, Central Saint Martins — take sustainability seriously, and embrace green practices at every turn. Sliding Galliano back into a big LVMH job wouldn’t simply be pushing forward a notion of “business as usual”; it would be “business as it used to be,” as out of step and unmodern as his Margiela work.
Beyond that, Galliano’s reputational makeover should be easy — at least in theory. Prada, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana and Balenciaga have all recently been cancelled or boycotted for actions seen as racist, misogynistic, and, in the case of Balenciaga, for sexualising children, and were largely forgiven by the fashion community, as well as consumers, in relatively short order.
But Galliano’s anti-Semitic outbursts seem to have cut deeper. When he was fired from Dior, executives said they received complaints from Jewish clients. The actress Natalie Portman, a Dior perfume ambassador, said: “As an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way.” One independent fashion curator has tried for years after the incident to convince major museums throughout the world to host a Galliano exhibition, without success. “Many board members are Jewish,” the curator recounts. “And they say, ‘No.’”
It’s not as if Galliano hasn’t tried to atone. As Macdonald shows in the documentary, Galliano met with Jewish leaders to comprehend the gravity of his behaviour. He says he’s been sober for 13 years. Sidney Toledano, the Dior chief executive who fired Galliano, and who is Jewish, says in the film that he has forgiven the designer. “People have realised John’s done his repentance for his earlier transgressions and seems to have evolved,” Burke says.
It might not be enough. “His ignominious departure from Dior — due to his anti-Semitism — is a blemish on his track record,” said Luca Solca, luxury analyst for Bernstein in Geneva. “I really wonder how LVMH could find a way to remove that stain and get him back. This seems difficult, despite the years that have gone by.” Most especially now, given the rise of tensions due to the Israel-Hamas war.
In the documentary, it is clear that Galliano regrets making racist and anti-Semitic remarks. The film’s viewers, however, “may not be convinced that … he’s sufficiently repentant,” wrote Variety film critic David Rooney in his review.
In the end, Rooney posits, “the subject is less defined by humbled remorse than self-pitying martyrdom.”
Indeed, not all fashion followers believe that, at 63, Galliano deserves another institutionally supported career reboot. “He’s such an incredible designer,” says the British, Jewish fashion designer Deborah Lyons. “But resurfacing him is insular self-indulgence. Why do we have to keep giving new life to John Galliano and Kanye West?” (West was also excommunicated by the fashion world, following an anti-Semitic rage in 2022) “Everyone is fixated on voices of the past. This is nostalgia. Surely, we are ready for the next thing now. Not re-platforming racists.”
Will LVMH ignore the backlash and go for it? Historically, when rumours this loud about the group are swirling around, there is truth to them. At times, I wonder if the executives plant them as a way to measure public response — a luxury take on an old-school politics play. What is certain is this: if Galliano were rehired by LVMH, the move would confirm what I concluded in my biography of McQueen and Galliano, Gods and Kings. In the age of globalisation, luxury fashion is ultimately just business.
This article originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph.
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