Wednesday, December 4, 2024

John Galliano’s racist tirade is presented in all its jaw-dropping horridness in new documentary

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Models throwing fresh mackerel at audience members; impersonating a lion while naked in a hotel elevator for four hours straight; a signature style of cutting fabric on the bias, giving birth to the iconic black slip dresses that took over in the 90s and forever after. Fashion designer John Galliano has made headlines for his virtuosic, generation-defining work on the catwalk as much as for his ludicrous antics offstage.

But for a documentary that recounts the divisive figure’s inexplicable fall from grace and everything that preceded it, High & Low is structured rather conventionally. Interspersing archival footage with talking head interviews and snippets of a six-day-long conversation with Galliano himself, the documentary unfolds largely chronologically.

As he traces the career of a larger-than-life figure, director Kevin Macdonald (Whitney; The Last King of Scotland) has to contend with what Galliano is most infamous for: successive anti-Semitic outbursts that resulted in him being prosecuted by a French court and sacked as creative director of Dior in 2011. And that is how the documentary opens – Galliano’s recorded racist tirade is presented in all its jaw-dropping horridness.

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