In what he claims to be his first “sober” interview, disgraced fashionista John Galliano has described a harrowing descent into a booze- and drug-fueled stupor that left him covered in sores and hearing voices before his vile anti-Semitic rant in a Paris bar.
“I was going to end up in a mental asylum or six feet under,” the 52-year-old Galliano told Vanity Fair about his binges while working as the top designer for industry titan Christian Dior.
Galliano, who was infamously caught on a February 2011 video drunkenly proclaiming, “I love Hitler” and spewing other anti-Semitic venom, said he has been sober since rehab a month later.
But the hard-partying Brit said his boozing escalated in the years before his outburst as he tried to escape the stresses of his ultra-competitive profession.
“At first, alcohol was like a crutch outside of Dior. Then I would use it to crash after the collections . . . But with more collections, the crash happened more often, and then I was a slave to it,” he said.
Soon, he added a dangerous combo of pills to the mix, slowly sinking further into oblivion.
“The pills kicked in because I couldn’t sleep. Then the other pills kicked in because I couldn’t stop shaking,” he recounted.
Finally, as he hit rock bottom, he would drink or swallow whatever intoxicants he could get his hands on. The binges would leave him in a pathetic state that shocked his colleagues and friends.
“Not having washed, I’d be covered in sores and humiliated,” he said. “I did manage to stop the voices. I had all these voices in my head, asking so many questions.”
Galliano, now hoping to revive his stalled career, said in rare moments of clarity he would try to straighten himself out, but the cures never took.
And his enablers were always there, leaving him in a fantasy world unconnected to reality, he claimed.
“I lived in a bubble. I would be backstage and there would be a queue of five people to help me. One person would have a cigarette for me. The next person would have the lighter. I did not know how to use the ATM.”
Galliano’s bosses tried to intervene but he wouldn’t listen.
The designer, hoping to revive his stalled career, again apologized profusely for his anti-Semitic screed, insisting he’s no racist.
“It’s the worst thing I have said in my life, but I didn’t mean it,” he told the magazine, which hits stands tomorrow. “I now realize I was so f–king angry and so discontent with myself that I just said the most spiteful thing I could.”
Galliano said that in the two years since he immersed himself in history books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.
He also met with Jewish leaders – including Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman – and slowly tried to get back into the fashion business
Last summer, he designed Kate Moss’ wedding dress for her marriage to rocker Jamie Hince, a move he described as “creative rehab.”
And despite his international disgrace, Galliano said he was thankful for what happened because it forced him to clean up his life.
“It sounds a bit bizarre, but I am so grateful for what did happen. I am alive,” he said.
Dior canned Galliano on the first day of French Fashion Week after the emergence of the video, which showed the couturier telling cafe patrons, “I love Hitler” and “People like you . . . would all be f–king gassed and f–king dead.”
He maintained he has no memory of the events.