John Galliano

Fashion Models

A French Revolution Graduation and Three British Awards

Galliano's biography begins with a displacement: born in Gibraltar in 1960, he moved to London as a child and attended Wilson's School in Wallington, which is why a designer born outside Britain is described throughout as a British fashion designer — the description follows his upbringing and training, not his birthplace. His training ended with a statement. In 1984 he graduated in design from the St. Martin's School of Arts with a collection inspired by the French Revolution. A graduation collection is a student's one chance to show what he would do if unconstrained, and choosing a historical revolution as the subject announced the two interests that define his recorded career: history as a source of costume, and theatre as the way to present it. He then started his own label, and the honours came in a pattern that maps his rise. British Designer of the Year in 1987 rewarded the young designer with his own name above the door; winning it again in both 1994 and 1995 rewarded an established one, and two consecutive wins in the mid-1990s immediately precede his move to Paris.

Givenchy, Then Dior: Irreverence Inside Traditional Houses

In the 1990s Galliano moved to Paris, and in 1995 he was appointed designer of Givenchy. His first collection for the traditional fashion label was marked by an irreverent style that shocked the fashion world. That reaction is the key to his appointment's logic. A traditional house hires a designer known for irreverence precisely because tradition alone has stopped generating attention; the shock is the product being bought. Two years later he left Givenchy, which passed to Alexander McQueen, and began to work at Christian Dior, where he continued his extravagant trends. Extravagant is the word carried over from house to house, so the style was his rather than either house's — the houses changed, the extravagance continued. The trajectory is also a promotion in scale: from his own label in London, to one historic Paris house, to Dior, one of the largest names in French fashion, within roughly a decade of his first British award. Alongside the acclaim, his record includes criticism from PETA for his fur creations, a reminder that the same appetite for rich, theatrical materials that made his shows spectacular also drew organised protest.

Suspension and Conviction in 2011

The closing part of his record is a fall, and it is stated in dated steps. On 25 February 2011, Dior announced that it had suspended Galliano following his arrest over an alleged anti-Semitic tirade in a Paris bar. The same day, a Paris-based citizen journalism site, Citizenside, received video of Galliano on a similar rant in the same bar the previous December — meaning the suspension and the emergence of earlier footage happened together, and the allegation was not a single isolated report. On September 8, 2011, Galliano was found guilty of making anti-Semitic remarks. The sequence matters for reading the record accurately: the February event was an arrest and an allegation followed by a suspension, an employer's interim step, while the September event was a court's finding of guilt, which converted allegation into established fact. A career that had been built on provocation inside the controlled setting of a fashion show ended its Dior chapter with conduct outside any show, for which the consequence was legal as well as professional. Set against the earlier sections, the contrast is stark: the designer whose 1984 graduation collection took a revolution as its theme, who won his country's top design award three times and was handed two of France's most traditional houses in succession, lost the second of them in 2011 not over his clothes but over remarks made in a bar.