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Galliano faces trial, Dior keeps the show going

(Agencies)
2011-03-03 15:05

SHOW MUST GO ON

Dior is one France's top fashion brands and is part of LVMH, the world's biggest luxury goods group.

Dior said it would go ahead with Galliano's autumn-winter 2011 collection for the fashion house which helps buyers decide orders and is crucial for the brand's image.

Some fashion insiders were weighing the implications of attending the show on Friday. The editor of a prominent U.S. fashion web site said he would not.

"I think a lot of people reacted with shock to this whole affair and they would, should and could boycott the show. I certainly will," said one buyer from Chicago on the sidelines of Dries Van Noten's fashion show, who asked not to be named.

A day after Galliano's sacking, rumors swirled around his succession at Dior with many fashion industry insiders pointing to Riccardo Tisci, designer at Givenchy, another LVMH brand.

JOHN GALLIANO LABEL

It was also not clear whether the fashion show of John Galliano's own label would go ahead as planned on Sunday and the designer's ousting raised questions about the future of his own fashion house, which is more than 90 percent owned by Dior.

"The exit scheme for Dior has not been decided yet," one person close to the brand said, declining to be named.

The John Galliano brand is tiny in comparison to Dior. It has only one boutique in Paris, is distributed mainly through department stores and multi-brand stores and barely breaks even.

On Wednesday Galliano won a cyber-squatting case over the Internet domain name galliano.fr.

Fashion experts expect Dior will stop supporting the brand financially or may spin it off. The John Galliano press office declined to comment.

The saga has cast a pall over Paris Fashion Week -- a bi-annual event for ready-to-wear collections that set the year's trends across the industry.

Ready-to-wear catwalks are more important in terms of orders than the industry's more exclusive haute couture shows. Axing Galliano's show would seriously disrupt Dior's operations as it would lose revenues from an entire collection.

Actress Natalie Portman, who was just about to start promoting Miss Dior Cherie perfume, voiced her disgust with Galliano late on Monday and said she wanted nothing more to do with him. Dior's press office for perfume did not return calls.