John Galliano is over. For now, finished. Dior? Probably not - in fact, I predict that a Galliano-less Dior will come out swinging and fighting. But, the fabulous, fantastically-Galliano version of it? Over. It has to be -- Galliano was stupid, wrong, and now, disgraced. Everyone is blaming alcohol; "he didn't really mean all of that". Well, to me, that's a crock of stuff you'd never want to eat: I have been a crying, slobbering, sloppy mess after record amounts of drinks and youthful angst, it is true. But, I have never said or acted in ways that were not somehow, or someway, true to myself.
Where there is smoke, there is fire, and Galliano is not a champion of the Jews; if he was not an (angry) drunk, I am sure the world would simply not know just to what extent, or anything at all: vodka let the cat out of the bag.
Nowadays, we live in an ultra-PC world; it's not always easy. And it's cases like this, where the "politically correct" mandate sort of goes to sh_t, and we witness a repressed, sociopathic and *un-politically-correct* outburst of epic proportions.
In the case of Galliano, I loved his romanticized, seemingly naive, global appreciation; he brought the most exotic and far-reaching civilizations to the runway and made them into fathomable, wearable art. He was the first "big" fashion designer (along with Gaultier) that I heard of as a teenager in the Midwest - it's sort of shocking to me that he appears to be a vigilant anti-Semite.
The first accusation was that he told a woman that she had a "dirty Jew face" (and of course, "cheap and ugly boots"). There's definitely a red flag waving when one is insulting anyone in that matter, but these outbursts are not what made Galliano a social pariah; 'I love Hitler' is what caused Galliano to detonate - it's not an alleged occurrence, as the video proves the reality - and when he said that Jewish posterity is a big fat mistake and that the women in the cafe (incorrectly presumed to be Jewish) "should have been gassed", it was done. The unanimous vote is that he was provoked, and I agree: I most certainly think he was; no, I do not think that those people he was accosting were just sitting around innocently with a cell phone recorder on, minding their own business. No. They were looking for trouble. But, provoked or not, drunk or sober, when does a person "cross over" to the dark side and start digging up/throwing up some of the most barbaric racial insults known? And yes, in public? Who does that? A multimillionaire, globally-conscious celebrity fashion designer beloved and coddled by all of the beautiful and important people? Yes...if he is not exactly all of those things.
Galliano's fellow design colleagues and fashion vets, are pooh-poo'ing Galliano being caught in the act almost more than the act of anti-Semitism itself, like Karl Lagerfeld:
"I'm furious that it could happen, because the question is no longer even whether he really said it...the image has gone around the world. It's a horrible image for fashion, because they think that every designer and everything in fashion is like this. We are a business world where, especially today, with the Internet, one has to be more careful than ever, especially if you are a publicly known person. You cannot go in the street and be drunk, there are things you cannot do."
And Armani "feels sorry" that poor Mr. Galliano was unaware of the hidden video recorder. And although Daphne Guiness condemns the Hitler remarks via twitter, she also hopes that the video was "doctored".
Well, me too. I hope this diabolical Hitler ranting is a grand-scale technological farce; I hope there is a law suit involved. But until then, I'm forced to see the hypocrite instead of the "genius": John Galliano may very well love Tibetans and nomadic tribes, but he's pro-Holocaust/Hitler, which makes him just as much of an anti-Semite, as it does a globally-minded, "genius" fashion designer..an incongruous and ultimate disappointment to say the very least.
