High & Low: A Review
Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald's documentary on British fashion designer John Galliano
Isn’t it time to forgive British fashion designer John Galliano for his suite of anti-Semitic outbursts at Paris café in 2010 and 2011?
That is the argument of High & Low: John Galliano, a two-hour documentary by Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning director of One Day in September and The Last King of Scotland, about the rise, fall, and attempted redemption of the long-canceled couturier, which opened in U.S. cinemas this weekend and will eventually be streamed on Mubi.
Galliano was fired from his prestigious post as creative director of Christian Dior after he was arrested in Paris for a physically violent, anti-Semitic attack on patrons at the café La Perle, and a video of a second incident, during which he snarled, “I love Hitler,” was published online. Dior’s chief executive at the time, Sidney Toledano, is Jewish.
As I wrote in The Style Files in September, the film appears to be the latest step in seemingly well-thought-out campaign by fashion’s powers that be—namely Galliano’s former employers at LVMH, and his longtime friend Anna Wintour, worldwide chief content officer of Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue—to publicly rehabilitate him.
High & Low was produced in association with Condé Nast Entertainment. Wintour shopped the project to directors for several years—I personally know three who turned it down—before landing Macdonald.
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