Film review - High & Low: John Galliano - Kevin Macdonald; 2023

Kevin Macdonald’s High & Low certainly wastes no time in getting down to business. Its opening shot is of John Galliano, sitting at the Perle cafe in Paris, visibly inebriated, uttering the antisemitic slurs that ended his celebrated run as the fashion designer at Dior and seemingly killed his entire career. Dramatically, it’s a bold point from which to start a documentary about one of the luxury world’s most contentious figures. However, it’s a credit to Macdonald’s skills as a filmmaker (remember his nail-biting Into The Void and The King Of Scotland?) that although nothing else in High & Low is quite as tense as this moment, the viewer’s interest in Galliano’s journey from Croydon to haute couture and beyond is sustained all the way through. 

For all his faults (or, more likely, because of them) Galliano makes a fascinating subject and it’s easy to see why Macdonald was drawn to his story. For one thing, his personal narrative is compelling. A working class London boy who displayed talent at a top art college, he attracted the support of serious heavy-hitters with his initial, money-losing collections, then found himself wined and dined by LVMH and appointed as chief designer at Dior, via a brief, mettle-testing stint at Givenchy. This was an extraordinary achievement: Galliano was the first Englishman to take up an haute couture post in France since Charles Worth arguably started the high fashion business in 1858. Collection after collection dazzled both critics and buyers, who appeared to have an unending appetite for the designer’s love of flamboyance and intense theatricality.