This is a short one and I’m not even going to look for a poster to go with it. It documents the fashion designer’s career rise at Givenchy and Dior, and then his nearly overnight collapse after he was filmed saying anti-Semitic garbage to some people who were near him. It opens with the film, probably one of the earlier cellphone videos, where he claimed to “love Hitler,” and then told one of the girls that he would have gassed all of them, including all their ancestors or “forebears,” as he puts it. He apparently did this two other times — occasions which were not filmed but have been documented. He lost his job right away and he went to trial for anti-semitic hate speech and got off with a 6,000 Euro fine.
The minute he came on the camera — and I imagine he’s around my age now — about 66 or so, because he started out in London in 1980 where the “new” designer movement began, I couldn’t look at him. He stares directly into the camera, mostly, which gives this intense and what I felt was a deeply dishonest stare. He reminded me of a teacher I had who could not, whether on purpose or not, maintain a proper distance when he spoke to you. That man was also a furious and demented liar. I was going to say “self-serving” but all lies are self serving.
I could never, in the whole 2 hours of the movie — when he was young in the 80s or older in 2021 — feel anything about him. And it was especially interesting when they contrasted him a few times with another designer who came from that London group: Alexander McQueen, who took the reins of Givenchy after Galliano moved to Dior. In the documentary about Alexander McQueen, which could be a companion piece to this one, it’s clear that McQueen was suicidal and that he was openly stating so. Why people didn’t see this is beyond me since he talked about it so much and even wanted to include his suicide in one of his shows, which he thought was be a wonderful ending. In that movie, there’s some humanity in McQueen and his suicide briefly intrudes into this movie about Galliano, when Galliano claims to be devastated by McQueen’s suicide. But that too seemed disingenuous. He probably didn’t give a shit.
There are a few tiny and welcome moments when we get a non-interested party point out the obvious — that the arrogance dripped from Galliano when he ended his show as if he was the final model, usually sashaying down the aisle and taking the longest to get there and back. And there was another comment I can’t even remember anymore — maybe the rabbi who had talked to him and learned that he knew absolutely nothing about the Holocaust. (How in the world is that possible?) But for the most part, this is a puff piece — a rehab piece that’s intended to show how he is able to come back and be his creative self again. But really, he should just shut up and retire. Do some scrap booking and blame the Jews for everything, and France’s strict hate speech laws. I can’t find the original video online anymore — it may have been removed — but this is a sorry/not sorry story in the same vein as Mel Gibson’s rant and Kanye West, Trump, and PewDiePie, who find themselves in need of rehabilitation but aren’t willing to either apologize or dig deep enough to even think about what they did, or why. They usually end up saying, “well it wasn’t so bad,” or “i didn’t mean it like that,” or, “Its taken out of context,” or in Galliano’s case, “I can’t believe I said that. It’s not me.”
It is he.