By Laura Medina
Before Dior then Maison Marigela, Creative Director John Galliano crashed when in an exhausted burnout or nervous breakdown, a drunk Galliano spewed antisemitic and racist anti- Asian slurs, slurred as his speak. When he realized the average French Parisian don’t give a damn about his high-level, high-pressured haute designer status, they burst his designer bubble, sending him and his career crashing onto Earth.
Coming back from the ground up, John Galliano is coming back as Maison Marigela, sprinkling his theatrical magic dust onto the runway.
His self-destructive documentary, “John Galliano, High and Low,” traces his antisemitic Catholic roots while his extreme low of alcoholism followed by his extreme highs in working out, to detox the drugs and alcohol.
It also shows you, what it means to be a designer of today.
What apprising designers really want to be, is be a Creative Designer.
What most folks call a design house, is really brands.
As Dior’s Creative Director, John isn’t afraid to say, he was in charge of two design houses with their own four lines of haute couture, contemporary ready to wear street/urban wear, accessories, makeup and skincare. Times two, John was designing 8 lines every year, non-stop.
There were no vacations, just research trips to create fresh fashion trends.
In-between, he had to do party and press, media blitzes.
No rest for the weary, no personal life, all that dedication and hard work accumulated into episodes of drugged and drunken nervous breakdowns.
Even his right-man committed suicide due to the responsibilities and demands.
When you hit rock bottom, your true friends come to your rescue.
Ironically, it was the predominantly Jewish fashion that came to John’s rescue. They owed up to saying the fashion industry that they’re part of and own and run, is reason why John had that infamous nervous breakdown.
After leaving Paris and resetting on a farm, John Galliano recovered enough to make a comeback as Maison Maricela’s Creative Director.
Of course, he’s now a different person. No longer hogging the spotlight as celebrity designer, he still sprinkle his theatrical magic dust on another genre-busting runway show but this exhausted bad boy hid behind the curtains.
In a “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” 1950’s period fashion piece, a young smart fashion executive said why don’t Dior expand into accessories of purses, shoes, and makeup, lipstick and powdered foundation mirror compact for the average woman to have touches of haute couture?
That idea have proven to be any fashion brand’s bloodline, the foundation holding the lofty ceiling of haute couture.
John Galliano was the real life, flesh and blood of that, burning out on non-stop treadmill of designing 8 lines of clothes, accessories and the beauty lines.
Those demands killed Alexander McQueen but John Galliano survived it.
Renewed and wiser.
