It’s been a week of stripping…. awards, winnings and accolades that is from two very prominent people although for entirely different reasons and across very unrelated fields. Yet the sum total is the same, fall out of favour and guess what..? All you shone for immediately dulls. There is one common connection and that is Paris, France but that’s about it.
If you have just come out of a Carmelite monestary you may not know that the US cyclist Lance Armstrong, the seven times consecutive winner of the Tour de France has been stripped of his medals due to doping allegations. As Lance is tired and emotional and won’t fight the charges…the medals and the titles are no longer his. We have many opinions about the whole bike-riding-doping-shenans yet as we’re not in the business of writing about sports or drugs, we’ll leave it to the myriad other publications to continue to debate this one.
What we will comment on though is John Galliano who was decorated as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the order is the highest decoration in France (established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to theDirectoire, on 19 May 1802) at the Élysée Palace in 2010, being recently stripped of the merit award by decree of President François Hollande in light of Galliano’s conviction last year for uttering racist and anti-Semitic insults. Quel, quel horreur. We can only imagine that Galliano thought things could not get any worse, yet they did and that is quite literally rubbing ‘sal’ into the wounds.
It’s not quite a year but the memory is clearly still fresh, Dior’s acclaimed couturier was found guilty of racial abuse and fined in September 2011. Prior to this finding he was rather quickly ousted from the French firm after his drunken tirade at a Paris café. Testifying in court last year, Galliano blamed work-related stress and a number of ummm addictions for his behavior. The fall can be that much greater for those in the public eye, after a while they begin to believe their own hype…then it catches them out. It will be very hard for Galliano, hence he is lying low, as being publicly disgraced has a somewhat lasting effect.
Image credit: wikipedia.com
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