John Galliano blames alcohol, stress, self-loathing for fall
In a Vanity Fair interview, fashion designer John Galliano tries to explain himself publicly for the first time since Dior fired him as creative director two years ago after several instances came to light of him going on anti-Semitic rants. (He was later convicted in a court in France, where making anti-Semitic statements is illegal; he received a suspended fine of $8,400.)
In his first interview since he fell from grace in 2011, Galliano says he isn’t anti-Semitic and didn’t mean what he said. “I’ve been trying to find out why that anger was directed at this race. I now realize I was so [expletive] angry and so discontent with myself that I just said the most spiteful thing I could.”
The interview, with Vanity Fair contributing editor Ingrid Sischy, is to be published in the magazine that hits newsstands in Los Angeles and New York on Thursday, but some snippets were released on Tuesday and it looks like it will be a must-read. Among the highlights (and some lowlights) in a Vanity Fair preview of the piece:
-- Galliano says he has never before given an interview while sober.
-- His drinking and use of pills sometimes was so bad he had tremors, didn’t sleep or wash for days. But he remained in denial.
-- At least twice before he was fired, his bosses at luxury conglomerate LVMH, Dior’s parent company, had tried to intervene, suggesting that he needed help.
-- After evidence arose of at least three incidents of anti-Semitic comments, and his dismissal, Galliano went into rehab in Arizona. The only person who came to visit him his first weekend there was model Linda Evangelista, who says in the article she didn’t want “that weekend to go by without anyone reaching out to him.”
-- When Kate Moss contacted him a few weeks into his recovery to say she still wanted him to design her wedding gown, he felt it was a gift -- “My creative rehab,” he told Sischy in the interview.
-- He is perversely grateful for his crash. Now sober for two years, “I have re-discovered that little boy who had the hunger to create, which I think I had lost. I am alive,” he says.
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