In fashion, conventional wisdom dictates, you can bounce back from anything - provided the clothes are good enough. But John Galliano might test that maxim because no fashion designer has ever tried to bounce back from allegedly saying "I love Hitler" before. And, apropos of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic outburst in 2006, Seventh Avenue - New York's "Fashion Avenue" - is even more Jewish than Hollywood. Mel's rant wasn't filmed, while Galliano's apparent video of a drunken, slurring bigot in a ruff and a silly hat telling two women that their forefathers should have been "gassed" will forever be out there on YouTube. mean, how do you walk into a big appointment to sell your 'vision' to the buyer of a major US store who just happens to be a Jewish New Yorker after that?" asks one glossy magazine fashion editor.The video was filmed on a mobile phone in a Paris bar in December 2010, but was made public only at the end of February this year after Galliano had been arrested for another alleged anti-Semitic outburst in the same café in the Marais, a now-fashionable area of Paris that was once the city's Jewish neighbourhood. Quite literally around the corner from the café in question, La Perle, is a primary school where the Nazis rounded up 260 children and sent them to the death camps. Making racist comments in France is a crime punishable by up to six months in prison.
It was a sorry end indeed for the golden boy of British fashion who went from sleeping on Parisian park benches to becoming one of the most bankable stars of the fashion firmament. A few days after the video broke, Natalie Portman, the actress who is the face of Dior, spoke out against him, and Dior officially fired its 50-year-old head designer. Galliano was then spirited away to rehab in Arizona at the urging of his friends Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss.
But watching the trial of John Galliano in Paris last week, I had the sense that being fired from the biggest job in fashion could be the best thing that ever happens to the former Dior designer. It might just save his life.
Indeed, the process appears to have already begun. The Galliano in court cut a very different figure to the Galliano caught on film. As Paula Reed, style director of Grazia magazine, who was one of the last British journalists to talk in depth to Galliano when she interviewed him last year, says: "He looked like he had been taking care of himself. He looked clear-skinned and dressed-down - for him - as if he was taking it seriously. He looked like somebody in recovery."
But how had he got so out of control in the first place? I would suggest that the out-of-control industry in which he toiled has a part to play. I spent two years, from 2008 to 2010, working on a biography of the late, great, hat-wearing muse Isabella Blow (a close friend of Galliano's) and discovered that fashion is a dangerous business in which to ply your trade. Yes, we are all responsible for our own actions, including which substances we choose to ingest, but the fact is that fashion has a curious habit of turning even quite normal people into self-obsessed lunatics. And the people who are a bit unhinged to start with - as many creative geniuses are - go completely mad after a couple of years in the fashion world's maw.
Some, like Alexander McQueen or Isabella Blow, end up dead by their own hand; others, like Coco Chanel, withdraw from the real world into a realm of fantasy and a rare few, like Marc Jacobs or Calvin Klein, both of whom have had serious problems with substance abuse in the past, sober up, clean up, and have a shot at emulating the steely megalomania of Karl Lagerfeld (whose sample quote on the Galliano crisis was: "I believe in discipline, so I'm not the right person to cry about weakness and things like this, but maybe I'm not human.")
Watching the video of his purported café rant, it seems that Galliano was on track for the same fate as Blow and McQueen. In fact, Galliano's story has much in common with that of McQueen. McQueen was the son of a taxi driver from the East End, while Galliano is the son of a Gibraltarian father and a Spanish mother who moved to Streatham when he was six. Like McQueen, Galliano attended Central Saint Martin's art college. Galliano set up a studio in London but, financially illiterate and given to hard partying at the infamous London club Taboo, by 1990 he was bankrupt. He moved to Paris where for two years he lived on handouts and slept on park benches. In 1993, everything changed when US Vogue editor Anna Wintour introduced him to financial backers. Kate Moss, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell all modelled for him for free at his first show.
Two years later, in 1995, Galliano was appointed creative director at Givenchy. He then moved to Dior in 1996, where he tripled sales which now stand at over 600 million euros a year. McQueen was given the Givenchy job, and while the two British men respected each other there was competition. Detmar Blow, Isabella's husband, recalls telling McQueen about one of Galliano's typically lavish shows that culminated in millions of fresh flower petals being released from the rafters. McQueen replied, "Yeah, but I don't have the budget for that, Detmar."
The irony of controversy causing the downfall of Galliano is hard to miss; Galliano built his career around the outrageous. His shows were famous for being massive, theatrical productions, often staged miles out of town in circus tents or disused warehouses. In 2000, he dressed models like tramps - "Le Look Clochard" - with newsprint dresses and dangling pots and pans. He was delighted that protesters surrounded Dior's offices as a result. In 2004, his debut menswear collection featured male lapdancers who treated squirming male fashion editors in the crowd to impromptu performances.
But the glaring similarity between the downfall of McQueen and that of Galliano is that both had a blind eye turned to their substance use because they were making so much money for their employers (McQueen had cocaine and sleeping pills in his system when his body was found; Galliano admitted last week to being addicted to alcohol and abusing Valium).
"When you have a designer at the head of a label making millions, your every whim is catered for," says one fashion editor who wishes to remain anonymous.
For example, one of the more bizarre facts to emerge at the Galliano trial was that Galliano's driver was trained to call his lawyer whenever an outburst began, to try and pour oil on troubled waters.
And although Galliano hadn't quite reached the stage of one British designer who only eats baby food because he is too busy to digest, Galliano was far removed from reality by February this year, and it wasn't just the drink and drugs putting him out there. As well as the driver and a lawyer on speed-dial, he had two personal trainers, a personal chef, and an endless stream of assistants.
"I think what happened with Galliano is that they kept on feeding the beast because the machine kept on performing," says Imogen Edwards-Jones, author of the book Fashion Babylon, which gives a detailed insiders' account of the industry. "The monster gets more and more out of control but as long as it keeps on hitting its numbers, and getting the show out, no one really minds.
"Fashion is a very stressful place to work because of the demands of doing the shows - no one expects a writer to produce two books a year on the dot - but it's also a very toxic place to work. It's very ephemeral. It doesn't save lives. It's all about glam and flim-flam, and if you are bright and creative and extremely clever - which a lot of these people are - it can become very soul- destroying."
Certainly, Galliano was under extraordinary pressure. In court he spoke of burying his best friend of 20 years and right-hand man Steven Robinson in 2007 (he had died of a cardiac arrest) and going straight back to work from the crematorium. He said the same thing happened when his father died, in 2005; he went back to work on couture the same night: "I started to have anxiety attacks, panic attacks, I couldn't go to work unless I had taken Valium. After every creative high, I would crash, and the drinking would help me."
Edwards-Jones says that when she was writing her book, plenty of people told her that Galliano was out of control. "Everyone knew. Everyone knew that he was drinking a lot and taking drugs. Half the industry drinks too much and takes too many drugs. Half the models are high. But no one cares about the emotional core of these people as long as they keep making the money, and the perfume sales keep ticking over and they can sell some luggage.
"That's what it's all about - shifting product. If you are shifting product, you overlook the fact that your head designer is an alcoholic with a horrendous drug problem and tell him he's wonderful. But when it goes wrong, they step over you like roadkill and move on to the next one."
This conflation of flattery and neglect goes to the heart of what is so rotten at fashion's core. It killed Isabella Blow as surely as her manic depression did. As one NHS psychologist observed in her medical notes, in any other industry, Blow's behaviour - inventing wild stories, stripping, setting a woman's handbag on fire because she had spilt a drink on her dress, chartering yachts and buying jewels she couldn't pay for, and wearing cocktail dresses and face-obscuring masks on the bus to work - would have been red flags that the person was not well, but in the fashion world it was positively encouraged. She was hailed for it. Craziness was her USP. But in the end, she was dumped by an industry that no longer had any use for her, and she found that impossible to take.
At the Paris shows in March this year, Christophe Decarnin, the designer who was widely credited for transforming the fortunes of the once-floundering house of Balmain into one of the world's most desirable labels, failed to appear for the customary bow at the end of his show. The unverified rumours were that he had had a nervous breakdown due to stress; but a spokesperson for Balmain said he was "resting". It was then announced, the following month, that he was leaving the esteemed fashion house. Praise for Decarnin appeared to be kept to a minimum: "Decarnin contributed, along with the studio, to the success of these past years," Alain Hivelin, Balmain's CEO, is quoted as saying.
As Marcellous L Jones, the editor of the Paris-based website fashioninsider.com, says, "The fashion industry attracts moths to our own flame, and most of the time people working in the industry are people who are trying to overcompensate for something missing in their life. It's an industry that takes so much away from us all, and gives back very little. It can consume you."
The verdict on John Galliano is due in September. It will be a long and painful summer, but, strange as it may seem to him this weekend, being found guilty may mean he is one of the lucky ones - one of those who gets out of fashion alive.
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