Who pays for fashion’s obsession with genius?

There is something revealing about watching three films about fashion in relatively quick succession.

John Galliano, McQueen and Alice Winocour's Couture, starring Angelina Jolie, are very different films. One is a documentary about the rise, collapse and rehabilitation of one of fashion's most controversial designers; another is a portrait of a man whose mythology eventually consumed him; the third is fiction, set behind the scenes of haute couture.

Yet watching them together, I was left with a rather uncomfortable thought: how much has actually changed?

Fashion has become considerably better at talking about wellbeing. There is more discussion of burnout, mental health, sustainability and the importance of a healthier workplace. Luxury companies have HR departments, wellness programmes and entire vocabularies for employee welfare that would have been unrecognisable thirty years ago.

But the fundamental bargain between fashion and its most talented people seems remarkably intact.

A designer is still expected to produce. And produce. And produce.

The immediate context is the cancellation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's planned John Galliano: Horizons* exhibition. The Met and Galliano announced on August 31 that the exhibition, which had been scheduled for May 2027, would not proceed. The decision followed criticism over Galliano's racist and antisemitic remarks in 2011, for which he was convicted by a French court. Galliano has repeatedly apologised, undergone treatment for addiction and spoken publicly about his recovery.

There is a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about whether a museum should devote a retrospective to an artist with such a record. There is also a legitimate conversation about whether artistic achievement can be separated from personal conduct.

What interests me, however, is a different omission.

In much of the debate, Galliano's behaviour in 2011 is examined in isolation, while the extraordinary circumstances in which he was operating are treated almost as background scenery.

At the height of his career, Galliano was producing 32 collections a year between his own label and Dior. He later described the workload himself: what had begun as two collections a year had become 32, with the work effectively becoming non-stop. In interviews after his collapse, he described being afraid to say no, taking on more and more work as his success grew, and eventually relying on alcohol, Valium and sleeping pills to keep functioning.

Thirty-two collections. That is roughly one collection every eleven days.

And these were not necessarily collections in the contemporary sense of a handful of looks assembled for Instagram. Galliano has said that individual collections could contain up to 1,000 pieces.

The number is almost difficult to comprehend. It is also worth remembering that Galliano was not simply designing clothes. His responsibilities extended across the increasingly elaborate machinery of a modern luxury house: ready-to-wear, couture, accessories, shop windows, marketing and the commercial demands attached to them.

The system worked because he kept producing. That is an uncomfortable distinction. A person can be visibly unwell and still be extremely productive. In fact, productivity can sometimes conceal how unwell someone actually is.

A functioning alcoholic who continues to deliver collections, attend fittings, satisfy executives, make the shows happen and keep the commercial machine moving can look, from the outside, like a person who is coping.

The designer as machine

The fashion industry has spent decades romanticising the tortured creative. The difficult genius. The obsessive perfectionist. The designer who works through the night. We admire the intensity because we associate it with talent. The problem is that the industry has also learnt how to monetise it. Alexander McQueen's story is particularly uncomfortable in this respect.

The 2018 documentary McQueen makes clear that the abrasive, confrontational public persona was only part of the man. People close to him describe someone considerably more tender and vulnerable, deeply attached to his parents, his family and his dogs. His relationship with Isabella Blow was foundational, and her suicide in 2007 profoundly affected him. His mother's death followed in 2010; McQueen died by suicide shortly afterwards. The documentary also explores his drug use, paranoia and increasingly troubled state of mind.

What is particularly striking is the way the industry turned his darkness into part of his mythology. McQueen was fashion's enfant terrible. But there is a difference between having a creative persona and becoming trapped inside it.

As Sleek observed after the documentary, the film leaves us with the image of a deeply troubled, drug-dependent and paranoid man who was continually revisiting childhood trauma, partly in order to live up to the reputation he had created for himself.

That is the part of fashion mythology that deserves more scrutiny. We celebrate the person who goes to extremes. Then, when the extremes become destructive, we treat the destruction as a private tragedy.

We know the problem

This is not a new observation. In 2015, Cathy Horyn's interview with Raf Simons for System Magazine, he spoke about the extraordinary compression of the fashion calendar. Six shows a year, he said, meant that collections could be produced in three weeks, sometimes five. His complaint was not simply that the workload was exhausting. It was that there was no longer enough time to think.

There was no incubation time. An idea, he explained, needs to be put aside for a week and reconsidered. Under the modern fashion schedule, that became almost impossible.

The problem with fashion's speed is not only that it exhausts people. It can also exhaust ideas. Creativity requires boredom. It requires time to wander around a thought without knowing where it is going. It requires looking at something, putting it away, forgetting about it and returning to it later.

The luxury business model increasingly asks for the opposite. What can we launch? What can we show? What can we sell? What is next? And what is next after that?

Alber Elbaz once said designers were expected to make things "bigger, better, faster" and increasingly cheaper. A singer can make ten great songs. A filmmaker can make five great films. A writer can produce three great books. But a designer can be expected to produce six to eight collections a year for decades.

His conclusion was almost comic in its simplicity: perhaps this is why some designers begin to behave strangely.

Elbaz understood the particular burden of running an independent house. In an earlier interview, he described the pressure of knowing that his creative decisions affected the salaries and livelihoods of everyone working for him. He was, as he put it, sometimes the conductor, sometimes the pianist, and sometimes the piano.

That last part is something people outside fashion often miss.

When the company is your own, there is no holiday

I know this from experience. When I was running my own fashion label, there was rarely a moment when I could simply stop.

January meant menswear. Which meant that December was not really December. While other people were thinking about Christmas, we were working on pricing, finishing samples, shooting the collection and preparing everything required for the next season.

Summer was no different. June meant menswear. September meant womenswear. The weeks in between were consumed by development, production, sales, deliveries, press, buyers and whatever had gone wrong that week and needed fixing.

August was theoretically the month when everyone went away. But when the company is yours, four weeks in August is not quite the same thing as four weeks in August when you are an employee.

Your employees go on holiday. You keep the company moving. Someone still has to answer the email. Someone still has to deal with the supplier. Someone still has to approve the sample, solve the production problem, speak to the buyer, chase the payment and think about what comes next.

And this is the paradox of fashion that is rarely visible in the finished product. The photograph looks effortless. The show lasts ten minutes. The business behind it can consume an entire year.

The people who said no

There have always been designers who recognised that the equation was unsustainable. Raf Simons left Dior. Alber Elbaz spoke repeatedly about needing more time. Dries Van Noten eventually stepped away from his own label after decades in the business. There is another, quieter group of people who simply decide they no longer want to live this way.

Patrick Cox is an interesting example. His career demonstrates both the possibilities and the contradictions of the fashion system: he built a highly successful shoe business, expanded internationally, licensed, collaborated and later returned to design. He has also stepped away from the centre of the fashion system at various points in his career rather than treating perpetual expansion as the only definition of success.

Christophe Decarnin's 2011 absence from Balmain's show offered a more stark example. He was reportedly under doctors' orders to rest after treatment for an illness variously described at the time as depression or exhaustion. He did not appear at his own show.

Not every designer who leaves a job is burnt out. Not every designer who works hard is mentally unwell. And certainly not every act of destructive behaviour can be explained by a demanding work schedule.

Galliano's antisemitic and racist remarks cannot simply be explained away by overwork or addiction. They were his responsibility, and he has acknowledged that. McQueen's suicide cannot be reduced to the fashion calendar. But neither should we pretend that the environment in which these people worked is irrelevant.

The system learns very slowly

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that we already know the answer. A decade ago, Vogue was asking whether fashion's creative-director system was itself broken, pointing to the relentless number of collections, shows and commercial obligations being placed on designers. It warned that the industry risked losing some of its most interesting talent precisely because those people either could not, or would not, accept a 24-hour creative-directorship lifestyle.

When a designer burns out, the system does not necessarily slow down. It looks for a replacement.

Couture offers a different view

This is what made Couture, Alice Winocour's film starring Angelina Jolie, an interesting third film to watch alongside Galliano and McQueen.

The film is not about a tortured male genius. Winocour deliberately turns the camera towards the people normally left outside the mythology: seamstresses, make-up artists and models. She spent a year and a half backstage at fashion shows researching the film, and was given unprecedented access to Chanel's haute couture atelier.

It is a useful corrective. Because fashion does not only happen on the runway. It happens in the workroom. It happens at the fitting table. It happens in the sample room at ten in the evening. It happens when somebody is still sewing while the creative director has already moved on to the next idea.

The designer is only one part of the machine. But the designer has become the machine's most visible human component. We ask that person to generate the vision, embody the brand, sell the vision, defend the vision, travel for the vision, produce the vision and then, almost immediately, come up with another one.

When the collection succeeds, the designer is a genius. When it fails, the designer is replaced. When the designer becomes difficult, the designer is a problem. When the designer becomes ill, the designer is fragile. And when the designer finally breaks, we call it tragedy.

Perhaps we have confused endurance with talent

There is a dangerous idea embedded in fashion that the best people are the ones who can withstand the most. The designer who works all night is committed. The designer who produces ten things at once is a genius. But perhaps none of these things are measures of creativity. They are measures of endurance. And endurance is not the same thing as talent.

The most interesting future for luxury fashion may therefore not be one in which designers are asked to become even more efficient at producing more.

It may be one in which the industry becomes comfortable with less.

Time to think

The cancellation of John Galliano's Met exhibition will continue to generate arguments about accountability, redemption and whether an artist's work can be separated from the person who made it. Those arguments are important.

But perhaps there is another question worth asking. When we look back at the great designers of the last few decades, why do so many of their stories contain the same ingredients, relentless work, addiction, exhaustion, grief, isolation and, eventually, some form of escape?

Perhaps the question is not simply why these designers broke. Perhaps we should ask why the system was so impressed by how long they could keep going.