High & Low: John Galliano review – Kevin Macdonald’s candid look at the fashion designer’s implosion

There’s an argument to be made that we have heard everything we ever need to hear from John Galliano, the subject of this knotty, complex documentary portrait. That after the formerly celebrated and adored British fashion designer was filmed, booze-sodden, bitter and spewing an antisemitic tirade at strangers from his preferred corner seat in La Perle, his local bar in Paris, his legacy should have been buried and the attention of the fashion world should have moved on to other, less radioactively compromised figures. But, as the Washington Post journalist Robin Givhan drily observes: “Fashion has a very short memory”, particularly, she adds, when it comes to well-connected white men with powerful friends.

Having been ignominiously sacked from his role as creative director at Dior in 2011, Galliano went to ground, first drying out from his alcohol and prescription drug addictions with a stint in rehab, then embarking on the thorough, painstaking process of making amends. Within a few years, the designer was back and active in fashion, in a temporary residency with Oscar De La Renta brokered by Vogue editor-in-chief, Condé Nast chief content officer and longtime supporter of Galliano, Anna Wintour.

Condé Nast Entertainment is involved in this documentary directed by Kevin Macdonald (it’s credited as one of the production companies) about the rise, fall and rehabilitation of Galliano. And given the vested interest that the business has in the industry and its highly lucrative maverick son, it’s surprising and refreshing that High & Low is as nuanced and thought-provoking as it is. Macdonald, whose previous films include the fiction features The Last King of Scotland and State of Play, and whose documentaries include Touching the Void and Whitney, is not in the business of providing a marketing-friendly whitewash of Galliano’s tarnished reputation. The choice to open the picture with a clip from the now notorious phone footage of Galliano, looking like a cross between a pantomime dame and a toxic spill, slurring racist taunts at a group of women, lays the cards emphatically on the table – this man is damaged, his words repellent – before exploring the hows and whys of the designer’s actions.

Macdonald is interested in more than just the man and his misdemeanour: this is a film that tackles the theme of redemption in the era of cancellation. Beyond this, it makes a case that Galliano, in both the highs and the lows of his professional and personal life, is inextricably linked to the industry that embraced him. “He is fashion,” says one interviewee. “John is a good metaphor.”

It wasn’t always thus. Talking candidly to the camera, Galliano recalls a less-than-glamorous childhood. Born in Gibraltar to a Spanish mother and a Gibraltarian father, he moved with his family to south London at the age of six. He knew, he says, early on that he was gay; he learned shortly afterwards that this was not something that would be readily accepted by his parents, recalling beatings from his plumber father and scalding verbal abuse from his mother.

Escape came through art – Galliano won a place at Central St Martins – and through cinema. Macdonald seeds High & Low with clips from black-and-white movies, with particular emphasis on Abel Gance’s epic silent film, Napoleon, which inspired Galliano’s stellar graduate show, Les Incroyables. It’s a little misleading as a recurring motif, although both men shared ambition, a fondness for dramatic headgear and were both, in their time, the toast of Paris; the comparison also suggests a strategic brilliance that Galliano, always more concerned with the superficial impact of his decisions than their consequences, shows little evidence of possessing.

Galliano’s genius – and genius is a word that is sprinkled as liberally as sequins by the film’s interviewees – lay in his ability to create drama as well as beauty. His models didn’t just walk the runway; they acted a role in the mini-stories with which he embellished each collection. And the models, for their part, adored him. It’s no coincidence that Galliano’s ascendancy coincided with the rise of the supermodels and the explosion of the fashion world into a multibillion dollar industry. A rich trove of archive footage captures the bottled lightning thrill of Galliano’s showmanship, both in the designs and shows for his own label and those for Dior.

But the fashion industry is a voracious beast, and as already showed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s documentary McQueen, which makes for a poignant companion piece to this picture, it’s a world that tends to magnify any pre-existing tendency towards addictive or self-destructive behaviours. Galliano survived; Alexander McQueen tragically didn’t. And in both cases, you wonder whether disasters could have been averted if the industry had been more concerned with the mental health of these brilliant, troubled men, and less in thrall to the many millions they generated in revenue.