JOHN GALLIANO’S fall from grace was complete yesterday when the British designer – until recently one of the most powerful and influential figures in world fashion – was found guilty of hurling anti-Semitic insults at customers in a Paris bar.
The court gave Galliano a €6,000 suspended fine over two anti-Semitic and racist rants in the same bar in February 2011 and previously in October 2010. The incidents have already cost him his job as chief designer at the Christian Dior fashion house, while he has been through two rehabilitation programmes to treat multiple addictions.
The fine, in line with what a prosecutor had recommended at the one-day trial in June, fell well short of the maximum sentence of a €22,000 fine and six-month prison sentence.
“Despite the triple addiction from which he was suffering, he was lucid enough to be conscious of his acts,” said the tribunal president, Anne-Marie Sauteraud, reading out the court’s decision.
The court explained its relatively lenient decision by referring to Galliano’s lack of criminal convictions, his previous regard for respect and tolerance and the treatment for drug and alcohol addiction he has sought since his arrest.
In one of the incidents, in February, a couple said Galliano repeatedly insulted them with lines including “dirty Jewish face” and “fucking Asian bastard”. Geraldine Bloch (35) said he uttered 30 anti-Jewish insults in the space of 45 minutes, while in a separate tirade, captured on film, he was seen praising Hitler to another customer.
At his trial, a gaunt-looking Galliano said he could not remember the incident because of a “triple addiction” to alcohol, sleeping tablets and Valium. He has largely withdrawn from public life, and is reported to have carried out two rehabilitation programmes, in the US and Switzerland.
For a man who was the world’s star couturier as recently as last January, acclaimed in the industry and estimated to be worth millions, the decline has been swift and brutal. He was sacked by Christian Dior within days of the allegations becoming public after peers such as Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld and actor Natalie Portman – who has a commercial relationship with Dior – condemned his behaviour.
At the time, the 50-year-old was considered to be at his peak. Since moving to Paris and becoming chief designer at Givenchy in the mid-1990s, Galliano – born Juan Carlos in Gibraltar and raised in London by a British plumber and a Spanish mother – was one of the most recognisable faces in high fashion. It was his 15 years as creative director at Dior that burnished his reputation, however, and he is credited with turning around what was a stale bourgeois label and making it a financial success story.
“John Galliano is fashion’s great romantic,” according to his entry in the British Design Museum. “From his fantastical clothes to his colourful background, Galliano’s charmed rise to fame reads not unlike a fairy tale. His genius is his ability to communicate this through his clothes.
“He also has immense ambition. Behind his gentle aesthetic, John Galliano is a powerhouse, a man whose ambition to go down in history as one of fashion’s greats is awesome, even intimidating.”
At his trial, Galliano apologised and told the court how alcohol and drugs helped him deal with a heavy, stressful workload at the two labels for which he designed, Dior and Galliano.
“After every high there was a crash,” he told the court’s three judges. “The drink would help me escape.”
He said the 2007 death of his partner at Dior made the situation worse. “The workload increased enormously,” he said. “And right around this time I lost my beloved friend Steven Robinson. Steven protected me from everything so I could focus on design.
“When Steven died, with his parents I buried him, we went to the crematorium – and I went back to do a fitting.”
Galliano was not in court yesterday, but, asked about his plans, his lawyer Aurélien Hamelle said only that his client was relieved and “looking forward to the future”.
Dior, for its part, has already moved on. At the unveiling of a collection a month after his sacking, chief executive Sidney Toledano drew a round of applause for an address in which he referred to the House of Dior, founded in 1947, as embodying “France’s image and its values around the world”.
He said it was “deeply painful to see [Dior] associated with the disgraceful statements attributed to the designer . . . It is our collective duty never to forget the Holocaust . . .
“We must publicly recommit ourselves to the values of the House of Dior.”
Speculation now surrounds Galliano’s successor, whose identity Dior promised to keep a secret until the verdict was delivered.