It's now okay to dislike Galliano for his views. And his dress sense

UNTIL NOW it was considered somewhat narrow-minded and illiberal to dislike John Galliano simply for his ridiculous personal dress sense. You might have thought he was attempting the cover-yourself-in-glue-and-jump- in-a-clothes-bank look, but that is because you did not understand the nature of his genius. If you believed he’d been dressed by a gang of giddy six-year-olds you were ignorant of his virtuosity.

But this week, after he was caught on film saying, “I love Hitler” and other nasty anti-Semitic remarks, it is acceptable to dislike Galliano for his horrible views. And his ridiculous personal dress sense.

In normal circumstance, the episode would be dismissed under the headline “Curiously dressed bigot gets comeuppance”, but this is fashion, where understatement is as alien as self-awareness.

Galliano’s attempt at contrition evolved into a triumphant homage to himself: “In all my work my inspiration has been to unite people of every race, creed, religion and sexuality by celebrating their cultural and ethnic diversity through fashion.” (When you have been caught displaying such horrific and dangerous arrogance, it’s always important to look humble.) It is clear now he will have to abandon his mission with the world not yet accepting of his efforts to deliver global unity through the medium of newspaper-print housecoats. We can guess who Galliano blames for that failure.

You would imagine that, since the emergence of his video, everyone would have written off Galliano and his attempt to live his life as if Zoolanderwere a gritty representation of life at the fashion coalface. Not so.

In the Daily Telegraphthis week Justine Picardie, a biographer of Coco Chanel (who, incidentally, lived with a Nazi officer in occupied Paris), described studying Galliano during his most recent show for Dior. "He twirled in an outlandish costume of his own design – a black and scarlet ensemble apparently inspired by Nureyev, his hair ironed into a dark bob, his face remade into a heightened version of itself – and there was something of the grotesque about him. The way he looked seemed of a piece with the stories of his retreat from reality, of the dark place that he might be inhabiting."

His face remade into a heightened version of itself? The dark place he might be inhabiting? I saw those pictures. They were hilarious. As with any time Galliano has stepped into view, you could use the snaps as laughter therapy in hospital wards.

Picardie continued: “If there is an element of professional suicide in Galliano’s recent performance on an amateur video, spouting theatrically hateful language, then there has also been evidence of that desire to shock in the past, albeit contained within the controlled framework of a staged show. In an age of anxiety, of uprising in the Middle East and widespread economic uncertainty, the fashion industry can no longer rely on shock value to sell its products.”

Because if there’s one lesson to learn from the Libyan crisis, it’s that skinny jeans are in danger of being so last season.

You might imagine it a stretch to suggest that Galliano’s bilious Holocaust rant in a Paris restaurant would be a natural extension of his job as matcher of shorts with a nice T-shirt. Picardie touched on that, but a piece in the Guardian was more explicit.

“If you are breaker of taboos, then antisemitism is only another taboo, no different from any other. It’s the saying of the unsayable,” wrote Linda Grant. “Is Galliano an actual antisemite who hates Jews? Who knows what passes through his mind, but by invoking the name of Hitler and gloating about the gas chambers, he is only doing what others have always paid him to do: shock.

“Fashion’s obsession with transgression, its demand that Galliano shock us even more each season, has played its own part in the drunken bar rant. It has lost sight of women, of our desire to dress well and to be beautiful. It has given us the increasingly desperate and exhausted tactic of taboo-busting instead of our wish to cover our imperfect bodies as pleasingly as we can.”

Really? Is it credible that Galliano’s bigotry was the outpouring of a creative mind; that he is a victim of his genius. Is it credible that his language – “your forefathers would have been gassed” – may have been anti-Semitic, but his drunken actions were only a symptom of the fashion industry’s obsession with dressing women in increasingly unflattering clothes?

And there you were thinking he was a hateful idiot in a silly hat.

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