I did stop buying Dior lipsticks and perfume... when the great Dior Style chief, John Galliano made some ranting comments, very much anti-Semitic and discriminatory.
According to the video posted in YouTube, the very drunk Galliano, was caught mid hand in an argument that lead to serious, discriminatory and defamatory remarks.
Fox News writes:
Mr Galliano, 50, was summoned by Paris police yesterday to face three people who accused him of racially abusing them in a Parisian bar in two separate incidents. The fashion designer denies the allegations and has made counter-accusations that a couple on Thursday defamed, insulted and threatened him. However, a mobile phone video posted on the internet shows Mr Galliano making a verbal, racial attack on customers in a Paris bar in December. The Dior creative director, apparently the worse for drink, is captured in mid-argument.
A woman asks: "Are you blond, with blue eyes?" Mr Galliano, wearing a large, felt hat, replies: "No, but I love Hitler, and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be... gassed and... dead."
In the third alleged incident, a woman approached Paris police at the weekend claiming she had suffered anti-Semitic abuse from Mr Galliano in La Perle bar in the Marais district last October.
Christian Dior suspended Mr Galliano pending further investigations after the first allegations last Friday, saying it had a "zero-tolerance" policy on racism and anti-Semitism. The Gibraltar-born designer was to present the Dior autumn-winter ready-to-wear collection at the end of this week.
Mr Galliano's lawyer, Stéphane Zerbib, said yesterday that he knew nothing of the video and his client insisted he was not anti-Semitic. "What matters isn't what's on the internet, what matters are the testimonies and the hearings," Mr Zerbib said. "What's on the internet doesn't have much value."
Mr Galliano was driven to a police station near La Perle bar to meet his accusers. French police often bring plaintiffs and defendants together in private to test different versions of events. Mr Galliano made no comment as he arrived. After news reports of the first allegations, a young woman approached police to tell of a similar exchange with the designer in La Perle bar last October. This appears to have been a separate incident from the one shown on the telephone video.
The woman said Mr Galliano had begun to insult her for no reason. She said that she had thought no more of the incident at the time, assuming he had been drunk. After the reports of his comments to a Jewish and Asian couple in the bar last Thursday, she said she had decided to come forward.
The Jewish and Asian couple brought formal complaints alleging Mr Galliano said "Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead", and "Fucking Asian bastard, I will kill you". They also accused the designer of "mild acts of violence".
Under French law racial insults are punishable by fines of up to €22,500 (£19,000) and six months in prison.
Galliano's outburst
* Female 1: "I can't believe he said that..."
* Female 2: "It's not good... [to Galliano] Are you blond... Are you blond with blue eyes?"
* Galliano: "No, but I love Hitler and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed and fucking dead."
* Females: "Oh my God."
* Female 2: "Do you have a problem?"
* Galliano: "With you – you're ugly."
* Female 2: "You don't like peace? You don't want peace in the world?"
* Galliano: "Not with people, like ugly people."
* Female 2: "Where are you from?"
* Galliano: "Your asshole."
I am very much appalled with this incident, that I decided to boycott Dior products, until such time that The House of Dior take some serious action and public statement redeeming themselves; and that they dont tolerate this kind of behavior from anyone who represents their brand.
Dior fired John Galliano after the video took an outrageous burst in the internet.
Financial Times' Scheherazade Daneshkhu, Jennifer Thompson and Vanessa Friedman writes,
"Sidney Toledano, chief executive of Dior Couture, said: “I condemn with the greatest firmness the statements by John Galliano.”
James Lawson, director of Ledbury Research, the luxury market research company, said Dior had to move quickly.
“The brand is bigger even than Galliano. As an individual he did something wrong but as long as the brand is quick to show to its consumers that this is not behaviour they would tolerate, the brand can survive. It helps that Galliano is not the [brand] name.”
Dior’s decision came after mounting public criticism. One of its star names, Natalie Portman, the Oscar-winning actress who advertises a Dior perfume, said: “As an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr Galliano in any way.’’ Mr Galliano’s lawyer declined to comment.
Yes, Yes, I am not Jewish, but I am very much Educated on the subject of Holocaust and the Nazi Regime. They are very much inhumane, and I am not happy that there are still people in this modern times who considered these actions favorable and tolerable. I admire the House of Dior for their wisdom, compassion and morality to dispel and disassociate the Brand from anyone who dares to taint the Company's reputation; and even anyone who is unworthy to be a part of the House, regardless of how big their name is.
Early this morning, as I was enjoying my daily dose of favorite coffee.. i found this article (see below) and read it three times!! I am very much a fan of Chanel. I love the Lipsticks and Bags.. pricey it is, but never goes out of style. I even consider Ms. Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel's, "Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance" as one of my life -forming values.
I followed styles and trends very carefully; settling on brands and pieces that are classic; those that have long term applicability rather than short term acceptance. I love her "There is no time for cut-and-dried- monotony. There is time for work, and time for love.That leaves no other time!". She speaks so wittingly and deep for a fashion woman. Her style comes from deep thought, elegance and sincerity mixed in perfect unison.
Urgh, I cant believe what this article is saying!! Now this!!!????
New book claims Coco Chanel was Nazi Spy
By JENNY BARCHFIELD - Associated Press Fashion Writer
PARIS (AP) — Coco Chanel: A fashion icon whose name has become shorthand for timeless French chic, a shrewd businesswoman who overcame a childhood of poverty to build a luxury supernova and ... a Nazi spy?
A new book by a Paris-based American historian suggests Chanel not only had a wartime affair with a German aristocrat and spy, but that she herself was also an agent of Germany's Abwehr military intelligence organization and a rabid anti-Semite.
Doubts about Chanel's loyalties during World War II have long festered, but "Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel's Secret War" goes well beyond those previous allegations, citing as evidence documents culled from archives around the world.
The book, published in the U.S. on Tuesday by Knopf, has ruffled feathers in France, where the luxury industry is a pillar of the economy and Chanel is widely regarded as the crowning jewel.
The House of Chanel was quick to react, saying in a statement that "more than 57 books have been written about Gabrielle Chanel. ... We would encourage you to consult some of the more serious ones."
Hal Vaughan, an 84-year-old World War II veteran and longtime journalist who previously wrote two other history books, insists that he is serious. "Sleeping with the Enemy" is the fruit of more than four years of intense labor born out of an accidental find in France's national police archive, he said.
"I was looking for something else and I come across this document saying 'Chanel is a Nazi agent, her number is blah, blah, blah and her pseudonym is Westminster,'" Vaughan told The Associated Press. "I look at this again and I say, 'What the hell is this?' I couldn't believe my eyes!
"Then I really started hunting through all of the archives, in the United States, in London, in Berlin and in Rome and I come across not one, but 20, 30, 40 absolutely solid archival materials on Chanel and her lover, Baron Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who was a professional Abwehr spy," Vaughan said.
Born in 1883 in a hospice for the poor in France's western Pays de la Loire region, Gabrielle Chanel had remade herself into the famed couturiere and proudly independent Coco Chanel by the outbreak of World War II. During the conflict, she holed up with von Dincklage — a dashing German officer 12 years her junior who was one in her long string of lovers — in Paris' Ritz Hotel, which was then under Nazi control.
The book alleges that in 1940, Chanel was recruited into the Abwehr — her nom de guerre borrowed from another of her lovers, the Duke of Westminster. A year later, she traveled to Spain on a spy mission — on condition that the Nazis release her nephew from a military internment camp — and later went to Berlin on the orders of a top SS general, the book says.
It also suggests that Chanel's alleged anti-Semitism pushed her to try to capitalize on laws allowing for the expropriation of Jewish property to wrest control of the Chanel perfume lines from the Wertheimer brothers, a Jewish family who'd helped make her Chanel No. 5 a worldwide best-seller.
The Chanel statement refuted the claim, although it added that company officials have yet to read the book and had only seen media excerpts.
"She would hardly have formed a relationship with the family" — which currently owns the entire Chanel brand empire — "or counted Jewish people among her close friends and professional partners," it says.
A US-based organization of Holocaust survivors said it was "shocked" by the book's allegations and called on Chanel to launch an independent investigation into the book's claims.
"The documents on Ms. Chanel's past are too serious and historically important to be cavalierly dismissed by the fashion house without any effort to confirm their veracity through objective research," said Elan Steinberg, vice-president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.
After the war, Chanel was arrested and released hours later, saved by "the intervention of her old friend Winston Churchill," the press release for the book said. She fled to Switzerland.
Asked why the book, which is chock-a-block with allegations of Chanel's shady dealings before, during and after the war, had turned up so much more dirt than the scores of previous biographies about the fashion icon, Vaughan had two explanations. Firstly, many of the documents he cited had only recently been declassified.
Secondly, he said, many people have a vested interest in protecting Chanel's aura of unsullied chic.
"A lot of people in this world don't want the iconic figure of Gabrielle Coco Chanel, one of France's great cultural idols, destroyed," said Vaughan. "This is definitely something that a lot of people would have preferred to put aside, to forget, to just go on selling Chanel scarves and jewelry."
Despite the doubts that have long lingered over Chanel's wartime doings, the multi-billion-dollar fashion brand that bears her name has sought to spotlight its founder. For the set of its last runway show — the fall-winter 2011 haute couture collection in July — the brand recreated a life-sized version of Paris' tony Place Vendome, swapping the towering Napoleon statue for a sculpture of Coco Chanel in her iconic tweeds.
Asked whether he thought "Sleeping with the Enemy" would tarnish the brand's reputation or adversely affect sales, Vaughan snickered.
"There's an expression in French, which translates as 'the dogs bark and the caravans pass,' and that's exactly what's going to happen here with this book," he predicted. Karl Lagerfeld — the brand's current designer whose ponytailed silhouette is almost as iconic as Chanel herself — "is not going to let this thing drift off anywhere, and Chanel will be a name for the next, I don't know, hundred years."
Oh my golly.. for now, the book's veracity is still questionable; doubts and questions are still posed. This is way different than the video seen in YouTube showing Galliano's remarks. The book's as well as the author's credibility is yet to be confirmed.
I am yet skeptic over the claims, nonetheless, temporarily until things are settled, forget muna my plans to get Chanel No. 5 :(
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