Philippe Virgitti had waited so long for two beers that he went inside and fetched them himself. That was the terrace of La Perle, in the Marais, on the twenty-fourth of February 2011. When the man at the next table sat down, a waitress came quickly with a mojito. Virgitti told the court that June that he knew the man was not right when he watched him fail three times to fit a cigarette into its holder. Two intervals: how long two beers take when nobody is coming, and how long a mojito takes when somebody is. What was said afterwards reached a court, and another encounter at the same café reached the world through a phone. The phone is the part everybody has.
This October the same man put a collection on a rail at Zara. I had read the announcement in March, and what I felt before I had an opinion was relief. Damn, I thought. He was giving a part of his dream to the masses. I had decided some time ago that John Galliano’s time was over, and here he was, with a commission from a shop whose doors do not require an introduction. That pleased me more than the clothes eventually did. I saw his own house and Margiela returning in familiar constructions; I found much of the collection derivative. The elongated tails of the coat brought back the historical dandy, and the dismantling of an existing garment brought back Margiela. What disappointed me was how comfortably those devices returned, how little the new setting seemed to trouble them. A wider distribution had not made the dream a new one.
One of the techniques named in the collection’s launch coverage is Deep Pockets: pockets designed to change how the wearer inhabits the garment. I read that twice. A pocket is where the hands go when a person does not know what to do with them, and moving it is an instruction to the arms. On a wool-mix coat, the front has been cut away, the pockets pushed back, the lapels extended, the tails lengthened. Whoever thought about the pockets knows that a garment is a posture before it is a picture. I can admire that thinking without wanting the coat.
What he had done was on the record long before the commission. Three incidents at La Perle, two of which led to his conviction. In the footage that circulated in February 2011, he professes his love for Hitler and tells the women facing him that their families would have been gassed. Dior dismissed him within the week. On the fourth of March the show went ahead in a tent in the garden of the Rodin museum, and Sidney Toledano stood up before it to condemn the remarks. He said their source made them particularly painful: someone admired for his “remarkable creative talent”. When the show ended, the people who had made the clothes came out in their white coats and took the bow in his place. The room stood for them. They clapped back.
At his trial in June, Galliano said he could not recall the incidents and described addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs. On the eighth of September the court convicted him and imposed a suspended fine of six thousand euros. There were also court fees and symbolic damages. In the Associated Press’s account, the court took his apology into consideration and noted the “values of tolerance” in his work. It held him responsible despite his addiction. Toledano had invoked the talent to explain why removing him hurt; the court considered something the work appeared to say about his character. I keep returning to those values in the clothes. A collection can borrow from a culture, celebrate it, misunderstand it, or use it beautifully. I am less certain that it can tell a tribunal how its author regards someone sitting at the next table.
In October 2014 Renzo Rosso appointed him to Margiela. When Galliano took his first bow for the house in London the following January, he wore its white work coat. The Dior ateliers had worn theirs when they stood in for him in 2011. I do not know whether he intended the echo; the coat was Margiela’s before it was his. A designer whose public appearances had been performances in themselves briefly appeared in the uniform of an atelier, and went back to work. Ten years later, announcing his departure, he thanked Rosso for the opportunity to recover his creative voice. He also said, “I continue to atone”.
There is just no forgiving for me.
There was a museum between the announcement of the Zara partnership and the shop. On the thirty-first of August the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Galliano announced together that John Galliano: Horizons, planned for the spring of 2027, would not proceed. Galliano acknowledged the continuing hurt caused by his words and the distress an exhibition honouring him could occasion. Thirty-one days later the collection went on sale. A retrospective asks a city to stand in a room with a career. A rail asks for an arm in a sleeve. The difference is useful until it makes the shop look innocent of honour. Zara has commissioned his work and put his authorship before its customers. The retailer is inviting customers to recognise him, and making that recognition part of the sale. The collection offers him a public place in which to be admired again. The exhibition and the collection can be judged differently without pretending that the retailer has offered him an ordinary job.
Talent was money before it was a natural ability. The Greek talanton named a balance, then a weight, then a monetary sum. The later English meaning of a gift entrusted to someone for use is associated with the parable in Matthew 25. A master going abroad gives five talents to one servant, two to another, one to a third, and returns to reckon. The first two have doubled what they were given. The third, afraid of his master, has buried his share and hands it back unchanged. His talent is taken and given to the servant who now has ten. What interests me is the expectation of a return attached to the gift. We speak of talent as though it belongs inside a person, then value it by what it can produce for somebody else.
Zara calls the garments he began with its archive. They supplied his “working prototypes”; his name supplies something else. People recognise it, remember what it has made, and are willing to invest in another use of it. A business can make that calculation. The difficulty begins when value enters the argument for forgiveness. Reviewing his Margiela debut in January 2015, Alexandra Shulman wrote that critics of his return would be “the poorer for it”, invoked his imaginative ability, and said he had done all he could to “pay his dues”. She also warned the industry against excessive expectation and adulation. The reader was asked to consider what opposing the return would cost them. That consideration is persuasive when we want the clothes. It leaves me wondering how generous we would be if there were nothing particularly good to lose.
Galliano has already had his chances. Margiela was one. Zara is another. He has worked, been paid and been celebrated; the commission cannot be sold as a rescue from fifteen uninterrupted years of exile. I am willing to forgive him, and I mean more than accepting that somebody has hired him. His own statement to the Met speaks of fifteen years of sobriety and continuing responsibility. I cannot know the whole of his life from that statement, but I can give the years and the acknowledgment weight. I am prepared to admire him again without treating that admiration as a betrayal. He has no obligation to astonish me as the price of being here.
That willingness would mean very little if it were reserved for people whose return promises pleasure. Someone with no house and no remarkable gift can change without attracting anybody willing to notice. That is the third servant. He was given one talent and was afraid, and the story has already told us what happens to him: what he has is taken and handed to the man with ten. I want that person’s future to include the possibility of esteem too. Nobody is owed a retrospective or a contract with Zara. But the absence of something valuable to offer should not leave someone condemned to being described entirely by an offence.
The people he insulted owe him nothing in return for another season. They can remain angry, decline his apology, avoid his work. My willingness cannot stand in for theirs, and no purchase can procure their forgiveness on his behalf. They have no duty to supervise his return. There will be trust that does not return, honours that are withheld, people who never wish to see him again. He will have to live with that while continuing to live, and what he does next should count for something even when it gives us nothing beautiful.
The first of October is on a rail, and a rail is where a thing can be picked up and put back. Nobody has to take the coat home. The sleeves are hanging there with nobody in them.
Elías Delgado
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