by Christos Zabounis
In 1986, at Jean-Paul Gaultier’s suggestion, I interviewed John Galliano. I knew nothing about the world of fashion, apart from the fact that a perfecto jacket was, at the time, the ticket of entry to Les Bains Douches. The interview was never published, anywhere, although, had I not lost the manuscript during a move, it might later have been presented, in the Dior years, as the first Greek discovery of fashion’s enfant terrible. Enfant prodige, in French. With a few exceptions, usually professional or very close friends, publishing photographs with the dead is considered a faux pas. Galliano was “dead” for a long time after a video was released in 2011 in which he praised Hitler. His genius was not enough to save him from dismissal at the height of his fame, and now from the cancellation of the exhibition at the M.E.T. Giorgos Mazonakis was a genius in his own field as well. I can partly understand the impulse of some users to bid him farewell by posting photographs of themselves with the artist. Yet the line between narcissism and an expression of condolence can be difficult to discern. What is plainly visible, however, is the downward spiral of some of the most talented among us into substance dependence, something that should concern us more deeply as a society. It is time to cross the Rubicon from the ease of glamorisation to the difficulty of recovery.
