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

The film-maker’s frank, even-handed documentary assesses the fallout from the former Dior creative director’s antisemitic tirade and his standing today

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.