Those of us who loved John Galliano’s work, and who have watched his meteoric rise to the vanguard of Parisian haute couture over the past fifteen years, are still reeling from his dismissal two weeks ago.
Coming hot on the heels of Jean-Paul Guerlain’s neo-colonialist croakings about “working like a négre,” which resulted in calls for an international boycott of Guerlain and LMVH products, the ominous rise of Marine Le Pen, and both Angela Merkel’s and Nicholas Sarkozy’s gloomy predictions about the “failure” of multiculturism, John Galliano could hardly have picked a worst moment to let it all hang out.
For the past three weeks, the glare of the media lights has fallen on the House of Dior’s own shadowy Occupation past, which, like that of Coco Chanel and Louis Vuitton, included collaboration with the Nazi occupiers and sympathizers, in Christian Dior’s case, making gowns for the wives of high ranking Nazis. A video from the 1960s, in which Dior’s niece expounds on the virtues of Hitler has even surfaced. Indeed, the furor around Galliano’s drunken tirade shows that France is still dogged by ghosts of the Occupation.
It is quite obvious that in an era of omnipresent internet exposure and faced with the condemnation and veiled threat of the newly crowned Miss Dior, Oscar-winning, Harvard-educated actress Natalie Portman, exalted by pregnancy to new and dizzying heights of wholesomeness, Dior’s Chief Executive, Sidney Toledano, and LMVH’s Bernard Arnault had no choice but to separate the fashion house and its name from Galliano’s new sleazy, scary psychopath act. For LMVH, still recovering from the damage control necessitated by old Monsieur Guerlain, Galliano and his racist baggage was just too hot to handle.
However, unhelpful hysteria has engulfed the fashion world. According to Rhonda Garelick in The New York Times, “the Galliano episode invites consideration of the curious relationship between French fashion and fascism.” Last week, The Guardian reported that “Jewish people in the French capital live in the shadow of hatred.”
Last week, The Guardian’s fashion columnist, Hadley Freeman, issued a ringing implacable condemnation of people who wear Dior, notably actress Nicole Kidman, who wore a black Galliano creation to the Oscars this year, entitled “No, it’s not acceptable to wear Dior!”
The point Freeman seeks to make is less “obvious” than she would like to think. Anticipating opposition from those who believe artists are judged on their work and not by their characters, she draws a hazy, awkward comparison between Galliano’s drunken tirade and the vicious anti-Semitism in the work of poet T.S. Eliot. It’s fine to read “The Wasteland,” Freeman assured us. It is not fine to wear Galliano. T.S. Eliot has his place in the hallowed hall of great twentieth century writers, and we all know it’s on every high school student’s syllabus, but it’s certainly in terrible taste for Kidman to wear a Galliano dress to the Oscars and she ought to be ashamed of herself.
“While anti-Semitism is always abhorrent,” Freeman concedes lamely, “Eliot did live in a different era and some adjustment of expectations must be made.” T.S. Eliot, certainly, lived and wrote in exactly the era of rampant, widely accepted, drawing room anti-Semitism between the world wars, which painted Jews as scapegoats and rendered their isolation, and their eventual dehumanization, respectable.
Galliano’s late night raving, on the other hand, is not only universally distasteful and unseemly, but widely viewed as strange, self-destructive, and sad.
Freeman muddles on vaguely with her "second reason” for reading T.S. Eliot and not wearing Dior. “Eliot, to my knowledge, never said all Jews should be gassed.” Is one kind of anti-Semitism better than another? Is it somehow more palatable to say that you don’t like the way Jews smell, as Virginia Woolf did, than to say, not beating around the bush if you will, that they should be gassed? Or is the first kind actually more insidiously dangerous, with its veneer of respectability? In the light of today’s scandal, as the establishment shrinks with horror from John Galliano and he slinks off to rehab, I’d say race hate in T.S. Eliot’s time, unfettered by societal censor, and paving as it did the path to the gas chambers with the approbation of the establishment, was more poisonous.
But does Eliot’s anti-Semitic undertones make him less of a poet? No. Why should Galliano’s make him less of a designer?
While we may and certainly should, as moral human beings, condemn John Galliano’s drunken race hate, slurred in the early hours in the Paris’ posh Marais district, we are not also obliged to condemn his creations as well, and as such, it is perfectly understandable why Nicole Kidman’s wearing one should not be equated with approbation for Galliano’s opinions.
The timing of Kidman’s choice may have been off, but it does not reflect her sympathy with Galliano’s assertion that all Jews should be gassed, any more than someone who reads T.S. Eliot, or indeed some other great writers of the twentieth centuries, including Virginia Woolf, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Ezra Pound, can be considered an anti-Semitic sympathizer. Do the Nazi dalliances in the 1930s (talk about timing!) of the late Philip Johnson, founder of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York or the dubious far right wing political leanings of Le Corbusier, arguably the most influential architect of the twentieth century, render their work less impressive or their artistic legacy less enduring?
John Galliano’s all too human failings cost him his job. He remains the finest couturier of his generation and the power of his creations still stand. In the years to come, we cannot be surprised to see Galliano’s work spotlighted in permanent collections in museums and in breathtaking temporary exhibitions, which will be but mere shadows of his dazzling Dior shows. The essays in the exhibition catalogues will surely celebrate his work, while acknowledging the frailty, imperfection and self-destructiveness of the man.
Let’s leave the moral philosophizing to others (Heidegger and Arendt anyone?) and stick to fashion.
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