John Galliano is dressed like Napoleon Bonaparte, in the mode of the regalia the designer wore to close his Spring/Summer 2007 Dior show. He was on top then; now the dishonored couturier is approximately two feet tall, and his strings catch in the stage light like gray hairs. A puppeteer stands to Little John’s left, working the strings to effect the former Dior designer’s shamed body language and ventriloquizing his painfully sotto voce answers. The real Galliano was dismissed from the house of Dior in 2011, after video footage was leaked of an anti-Semitic rant at a Parisian bar. This puppet is doing his part. He says he’s sorry.
It took Etienne Bideau-Rey one week to make Little John out of wood, clay, plaster, and resin. Little John’s sheeny blue jacket is made with material Bideau-Rey salvaged from a textile shop’s garbage; his white pants are cotton baby trousers. He picked the Napoleon-style outfit out of options Anja Cronberg, the playwright and director, put before him. “I felt it would be perfect for a puppet,” Bideau-Rey told me. “By the way, the real John already looked like a puppet in it!”
The 20 minute puppet show plays at 8 PM this Thursday night at David Lynch’s night club Silencio, in Paris, after opening in London last October. Little John Talks samples from John Galliano's appearance on Charlie Rose this past summer, which followed close on the heels of an exclusive he gave Ingrid Sischy for Vanity Fair. In the TV interview, Rose was like a priest administering confession to Galliano, who, mustache-less and wearing a puerile navy blue suit, played the thoroughly scoured little boy in need of absolution.
At the time, Anja Cronberg, a senior research fellow at London College of Fashion, was working on the new, “Power”-themed issue of her smart sartorial journal Vestoj. Seeing an opportunity to have a conversation about the nature of these media treatments, she scripted Little John Talks.
I sat down with Cronberg in Paris in December to talk about the power play.
Chantel Tattoli: How did you come up with the idea for this play?
Anja Cronberg: The whole Galliano affair I found really intriguing, like a lot of people [did]. It’s always fascinating when someone who seems to be at the top of their game falls so far and so hard in such a puzzling way. When it’s someone so famous and celebrated—which is usually a protected space to be in––[he or she] only ever appears to the public in a particular way.
Camera-ready.
Yes. So when you have that persona you’ve built up suddenly crack…
Like Galliano, who is suddenly hanging by a thread—literally in the play, and figuratively in real life.
[Laughing] I know it’s tricky when you do commentary on someone who is not only the two-dimensional cardboard figure, but also a human being, com
It took Etienne Bideau-Rey one week to make Little John out of wood, clay, plaster, and resin. Little John’s sheeny blue jacket is made with material Bideau-Rey salvaged from a textile shop’s garbage; his white pants are cotton baby trousers. He picked the Napoleon-style outfit out of options Anja Cronberg, the playwright and director, put before him. “I felt it would be perfect for a puppet,” Bideau-Rey told me. “By the way, the real John already looked like a puppet in it!”
The 20 minute puppet show plays at 8 PM this Thursday night at David Lynch’s night club Silencio, in Paris, after opening in London last October. Little John Talks samples from John Galliano's appearance on Charlie Rose this past summer, which followed close on the heels of an exclusive he gave Ingrid Sischy for Vanity Fair. In the TV interview, Rose was like a priest administering confession to Galliano, who, mustache-less and wearing a puerile navy blue suit, played the thoroughly scoured little boy in need of absolution.
At the time, Anja Cronberg, a senior research fellow at London College of Fashion, was working on the new, “Power”-themed issue of her smart sartorial journal Vestoj. Seeing an opportunity to have a conversation about the nature of these media treatments, she scripted Little John Talks.
I sat down with Cronberg in Paris in December to talk about the power play.
Little John Talks will play in Paris on January 23 and in London on February 4 at the London College of Fashion | RSVP to anja@vestoj.com
Chantel Tattoli: How did you come up with the idea for this play?
Anja Cronberg: The whole Galliano affair I found really intriguing, like a lot of people [did]. It’s always fascinating when someone who seems to be at the top of their game falls so far and so hard in such a puzzling way. When it’s someone so famous and celebrated—which is usually a protected space to be in––[he or she] only ever appears to the public in a particular way.
Camera-ready.
Yes. So when you have that persona you’ve built up suddenly crack…
Like Galliano, who is suddenly hanging by a thread—literally in the play, and figuratively in real life.
[Laughing] I know it’s tricky when you do commentary on someone who is not only the two-dimensional cardboard figure, but also a human being, com