ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S review of High & Low: John Galliano - Fragile, drunk, ranting, anti-Semitic

ALEXANDRA SHULMAN'S review of High & Low: John Galliano - Fragile, drunk, ranting, anti-Semitic. So why did no one try to save him from himself?
There is a telling line in High & Low: John Galliano, when Sidney Toledano, former CEO of Christian Dior, reflects on the designer's time as the brand's creative director: 'You never thought the guy had a problem because he never said, 'I'm not feeling well'.'
That seems extraordinary - given that anybody who met Galliano during most of those 15 years at Dior could see that he had myriad problems. Take your pick: drugs, alcohol, mental health.
My recollection, as the editor of Vogue at the time, is that John was wildly late or missed appointments altogether.
He was accompanied by an entourage of minders, frequently looked unhealthy, veered from depressed to manic, and hid from the outside world behind a cohort of employees and enablers.
The gilded cage of his life insulated him from anyone but the chosen few, while the demands of constantly delivering for Dior took its toll on his fragile personality.
In the new documentary film about Galliano's life, directed by Oscar-winning Kevin Macdonald (whose previous films include Whitney and One Day In September), he admits wanting to escape into drink after each show.
During one season, he locked himself in a hotel lift naked and pretended to be a lion - for four hours.
When the most powerful man in fashion, chairman of LVMH Bernard Arnault, suggests his 'problem' could lead to serious harm, Galliano rips his shirt apart to expose his obsessively sculpted body and asks: 'Is this the body of an alcoholic?' We don't discover what Arnault did next.
Macdonald's documentary charts the rise, fall - and re-emergence - of Galliano and pulls few punches from the first, shocking footage of John's drunken, anti-Semitic rants to a lonely-looking Galliano backstage at a show for Margiela.
In his high-pitched voice - an amalgam of Parisian hauteur and south London twang - Galliano faces the camera full-on and tells us he will reveal everything. I expect how true his recollections are depends on who is listening and what he can actually remember.
I came to know Galliano after he was fired from Dior, following the events of 2011, when he was filmed directing anti-Semitic insults at a couple in his local bar.
Previous to that, we would say an occasional hello, but I had little contact with the man many thought of as the most talented designer of his age.
In 2013, I felt it was time to give him the second chance we all deserve and invited him to guest fashion edit a story for Vogue's Christmas edition.
He was wary, still nervous about his public humiliation, but it gave me an insight into how his imagination worked. Pages of notes arrived from his retreat in France, sent by the local priest who possessed the only wi-fi in the vicinity.
The notes were chaotic. Kate Moss was to be the model, there would be an amalgam of heady Russian muses, he would appear as a pianist, and photographer Tim Walker would capture the fantasy.
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