French fashion house Dior said today it is firing John Galliano after complaints were lodged with police that their star designer made offensive and anti-Semitic comments.
Dior said it decided to start procedures to fire Galliano after seeing a video clip that purportedly shows the designer shouting abuse at people in a Paris bar.
"I very firmly condemn what was said by John Galliano, which totally contradicts the values which have always been defended by Christian Dior," the company's chief executive Sidney Toledano said in a statement today.
Galliano was escorted home by French police last Thursday night after a drinking session in Paris that ended with him hurling insults at a couple, according to a police source. His lawyer Stephane Zerbib said the designer denied making racist or anti-Semitic comments.
But speculation about his future intensified after a woman lodged a new complaint on Saturday about a similar incident in October and a video surfaced on newspaper sites around the world.
The video shows a person who looks like Galliano spewing insults on a bar terrace. The person slurs and uses explicit language as he tells a woman at the next table that she is ugly, that he loves Hitler and that "people like you would be dead today - your mothers, your forefathers would be gassed".
Mr Zerbib said he could not say whether the person in the clip was Galliano.
Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman, who promotes perfume for Dior condemned Mr Galliano for his anti-Semitic tirade at the weekend. Portman, who won an Academy Award on Sunday for Best Actress and is Jewish, said she would not be associated with Galliano, in a statement carried by the New York Times.
Galliano ignored questions yesterday as he strode through a crowd of reporters outside a police station in central Paris, his face largely hidden by a wide-brimmed black hat as he emerged from a car. He was inside for more than five hours.
The French anti-racism group SOS Racisme said yesterday it would pursue charges against the designer, as French television broadcast the video, already widely distributed across the internet.
Dior is one of the biggest fashion brands and Galliano has been its creative director since 1996.
Galliano, named British designer of the year four times, previously worked at Givenchy. He was succeeded there by the late Alexander McQueen who later created his own label, now part of the French group PPR.
Agencies