John Galliano

The person who bet on Galliano was Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, who used her considerable pull to help find him backing and a platform. In 1995 the luxury conglomerate LVMH, run by Bernard Arnault, appointed him head of Givenchy — the first British designer to lead a French couture house. It was a startling promotion for a designer who had spent a decade nearly broke. A year later, Arnault moved him to the crown jewel: Christian Dior.

At Dior, Galliano had, for the first time, the resources to match his imagination, and the results were extraordinary. His couture shows became the most anticipated events on the calendar — spectacles staged in circus tents and abandoned stations, models transformed into geishas, empresses, and figures from Klimt paintings. He mined the house archive for its founder's New Look and then blew it up into something operatic. For a stretch of the late 1990s and 2000s, a Galliano show was the closest fashion came to opera.

The eruption came at La Perle in February 2011. In footage recorded on a phone, a visibly intoxicated Galliano told the people at the next table that he loved Hitler and that people like them would be gassed. It was grotesque, and there was no ambiguity in it. An earlier complaint from the same bar surfaced alongside the video. Whatever context his defenders would later reach for — the addiction, the collapse — none of it softened the words themselves, which were as plain as they were vile.

Dior acted with a speed that reflected exactly how much was at stake. The house suspended him within a day and dismissed him within a week, stripping his name from a role he had defined for fifteen years. Sidney Toledano, then Dior's chief executive, condemned the remarks unequivocally. The timing sharpened everything: it was couture season and Oscar season at once, and Natalie Portman, the Dior perfume face who won her Academy Award days later, said she was deeply shocked and would not be associated with him.

The first tentative signal came from Oscar de la Renta, the American designer, who in 2013 quietly gave Galliano a residency in his New York atelier — a gesture of rehabilitation from a man widely respected and, notably, Jewish, which many read as a deliberate act of forgiveness with weight behind it. It tested the water. The water held. A year later, in 2014, the OTB group appointed Galliano creative director of Maison Margiela, the Belgian-founded house known for its intellectual, deconstructed anonymity — about as far from Dior's spectacle as fashion gets.

The choice was shrewd. Margiela was small, artful, and self-serious; it offered Galliano a place to work rather than a stage to perform on, and it let him prove the craft was still there without the glare. Over the following decade he rebuilt slowly, and in January 2024 his Artisanal couture show for Margiela — a haunting, porcelain-skinned collection staged under a Paris bridge — was received as one of the great shows of the era, the kind of unanimous acclaim that effectively closed the loop on his exile.

The man filmed slurring at La Perle in 2011 and the man who staged the acclaimed Margiela couture show in 2024 are the same person, and the distance between those two nights is the whole story. Galliano got sober, stayed largely out of public argument, and let the collections speak — first from the quiet of an atelier, then from the top of a house again. The path back ran precisely through the thing that had made him famous before it made him untouchable: the work itself.