What the Met’s John Galliano Reversal Reveals
Was it ever a good idea for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to honor John Galliano, a British fashion designer who has made hateful remarks about Asians and Jews, at its spring Costume Institute exhibition and gala? Despite all the anguish, this isn’t a trick question; for local politicians, it was more like a softball. “This seems very straightforward to me,” Brad Lander, a Democratic congressional candidate from Brooklyn, told the Times, saying that the Met should cancel the exhibition and pick a new Met Gala honoree. The New York assemblyman Micah Lasher said he was “baffled that anyone saw this as anything other than a terrible idea.” The Mamdani administration, which has been accused of insensitivity when it comes to such issues, delivered a statement describing Galliano’s “repeated use of antisemitic language” as “vile.” Earlier, Julie Menin, the speaker of the New York City Council, and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, had sent a letter to Met leadership urging them to reconsider; prominent donors, such as Alice Tisch, proceeded to put pressure on the Met, too, with Arne Glimcher, the founder of Pace Gallery, even threatening to cut the museum out of his will. The exhibition was formally nixed on August 31st, one month to the day after it was first announced.
It’s worth clarifying that Galliano wasn’t cancelled; he was convicted. In September, 2011, he was found guilty of a hate crime by a French court, following three separate antisemitic encounters at the same café in Paris. In a video of one of these incidents, published by the Sun earlier that year, a visibly intoxicated Galliano tells patrons at a nearby table, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be fucking gassed.” In another tirade, Galliano called a museum curator, Geraldine Bloch—who, again, just happened to be sitting near him—“a fucking ugly Jewish bitch,” and threatened her friend Philippe Virgitti: “Fucking Asian bastard, I will kill you.” As Bloch later testified, during the course of Galliano’s roughly forty-five-minute rant, he used the word “Jewish” something like thirty times.
Galliano said that he didn’t remember the altercations, because he was suffering from a “triple addiction” to alcohol, Valium, and sleeping pills, in an attempt to cope with the pressures of the fashion industry. (Before the trial, he went to rehab in Arizona and in Switzerland.) He said that he was not a bigot but rather “someone who needs help.” Still, soon after his antisemitic remarks came to light, he was fired from his post as creative director of Christian Dior, a position he had held for roughly a decade and a half.
On the day of his conviction, Angelique Chrisafis, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, expressed doubt that Galliano would “ever be able to redeem himself at the top of the fashion world.” The fashion editor Robin Givhan, covering a Dior runway show just days after Galliano’s firing, marvelled at how the designer had been fully erased from the production, not even appearing in the show’s notes, although the clothes, obviously, had been designed under his supervision The erasure was unsettling, Givhan argued, but not because it bode poorly for Galliano’s future; rather, it demonstrated how quickly the fashion industry is able to move on. Forgetting Galliano’s behavior, Givhan wrote, in Newsweek, “would be the greatest tragedy of all.”
The industry didn’t forget, exactly, but it did move on. Galliano spent two years out of the spotlight, studying with the Rabbi Barry Marcus and meeting with Abraham Foxman, then the director of the Anti-Defamation League, apologizing, and trying to educate himself. Foxman, who died this past May, was among the Jewish leaders who believed that the designer had, as they say, done the work of earning forgiveness. “Mr. Galliano has worked arduously in changing his worldview and and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading, and learning about the evils of anti-Semitism and bigotry,” Foxman said, in January, 2013.
That same month, the Guardian published an article with the headline “How Fashion Forgave John Galliano,” pegged to the announcement that he would be doing a temporary residency with Oscar de la Renta, an arrangement reportedly brokered by Anna Wintour, who is Vogue’s global editorial director, the co-chair of the Met Gala, and a champion of Galliano’s innovative designs since the beginning of his career. (Wintour is also the chief content officer of Condé Nast, which owns both Vogue and The New Yorker.) The following year, Galliano was named the creative director of Maison Margiela, and, in the time since, has returned to dressing celebrities, including Kim Kardashian at the 2024 Met Gala. His latest gig is a partnership with the global fast-fashion retailer Zara, and the first collection is set to début later this month.
For at least the past three years, according to The Cut, Wintour has set out to honor Galliano’s work at the Met. Twice, the museum has pursued a Galliano exhibition, and, twice now, it has fallen apart. The designer’s relative mainstreamness, and the fact that his clothes can already be found on the gala’s carpet, might make the ethics of a Galliano-themed exhibition and gala seem nebulous: if we’re O.K. with that, then why not with this? But it’s the fact that Galliano is doing just fine in a professional sense that makes the obsession with publicly honoring him—and doing so in a way that only two other living designers have ever been honored—puzzling to so many. This is not Robert Downey, Jr., asking Hollywood to forgive his friend Mel Gibson (after a well-publicized antisemitic rant) and to allow him to work again, as Downey did in 2011, during an awards ceremony; it’s more like an attempt to give Gibson a special Oscar and anoint him a spokesperson for Hollywood (which, I guess, Trump basically did).
Critics have, rightly, pointed out that Wintour and the Costume Institute’s head curator, Andrew Bolton, overplayed their hands, by moving forward with this latest exhibition before consulting all the members of the Met’s board. Wintour, Galliano, and Bolton, having met with Jewish leaders during the planning process for the exhibition, seemed to believe that they had, more or less, received the Jewish community’s blessing to put on the show. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism in North America, left a meeting with Galliano feeling that the designer was sincere; some of the attendees invoked the principle of teshuvah, or repentance. Jonathan Greenblatt, Foxman’s successor at the A.D.L., wrote in a statement to the Times that Galliano had “genuinely worked through the issues that led to his antisemitic outburst years ago,” and that the A.D.L. had “long since accepted his apology.”
Still, even among those who opposed the exhibition, there is hardly anyone arguing that Galliano shouldn’t be forgiven. Menin wrote in her letter to the Met that she believes “in repentance and second chances,” but that honoring Galliano at the museum went beyond “mere forgiveness.” Greenblatt, who was ultimately part of the chorus of voices urging the Met to cancel the show, wrote on X that his original statement to the Times had not been printed in full. “Some Jews may question the decision to include Galliano’s work in an exhibit given the massive spike in antisemitism in recent years,” it read. “And it’s not just the increase in incidents that’s at issue; it’s also the insensitivity that political leaders in this city and elsewhere have shown toward the Jewish community.”
To the organizers of the show, the varying responses might have been confounding, and yet it also seems peculiar—or ill timed, at best—to honor a designer who said “I love Hitler,” at the most widely watched gala of the year, particularly at a moment when antisemitism has spiked so markedly. Why was it an idea that needed to be focus-grouped at all? The decision to honor Galliano put the Jewish community in “a no-win position,” as the rabbi David Ingber, the senior director of the Bronfman Center at 92Y, told the Times. “Either we are blamed for being overly sensitive and not allowing him to be honored or we are complicit.”
The plan, at least on paper, was for the Met to grapple with Galliano’s history. A press release from the museum said that “the exhibition will consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.” This conversation is clearly more important than ever, but the problem is that it doesn’t fit into any version of the Met Gala we’ve seen before. (Nor does it fit into any version of any contemporary celebrity event, or modern celebrity-interview culture, which seems largely manufactured to avoid a situation in which anyone ever has to confront an uncomfortable question.) This is why Robin Givhan, in a recent column for the Times, smartly proposed that the Met keep the Galliano exhibition but cancel the celebratory gala—a solution that is simultaneously correct and yet completely unrealistic, given that the event raises tens of millions of dollars for the Costume Institute.
Galliano’s rise in the mid-nineteen-nineties parallels a larger shift in luxury fashion, which went from being a niche commodity to a mass spectacle. Along with Alexander McQueen, then the chief designer at Givenchy, Galliano represented a new generation of designers who turned small fashion houses into giant, global brands, the bulwark of a multibillion-dollar industry—although that industry would go on to break them, as Dana Thomas chronicles in “Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.” McQueen, who, like Galliano, suffered from mental-health issues and addiction, died by suicide in February, 2010; the following year, he was honored by the Met. Bolton told the Times that 2010 was the year that he first began considering a Galliano exhibition. One might see celebrating Galliano’s career as a way of celebrating how we got to a place where people even care what the theme of the Met Gala is. Some observers have pointed out that, in the same way that the Met honored the late, great, and controversial Karl Lagerfeld, back in 2023, we may well get a Galliano-themed gala years from now, after the designer has died, and can no longer benefit from it financially and reputationally. And yet this idea also feels strangely revealing, sort of like a collective kicking of the can down the road—a promise to deal with something only once it’s “history,” even as it’s roiling our present.
As for now, the Met is scrambling to come up with a new theme for the 2027 Costume Institute exhibition and gala. (We can only hope that we get something better than “Sleeping Beauties,” which replaced the last prospective Galliano exhibition, in the spring of 2024.) The ensuing chaos is one of many reasons why this whole affair will inevitably be remembered as a failure, but, in terms of failures, it’s a demonstrative one: not just of the perils of institutional and executive overreach but of the ability for such power to be met, challenged, and, in a span of a few weeks, overruled—an increasingly rare dynamic these days. As easy as it is to forget, this is what it looks like when a system is functioning, when checks and balances work. We have spent years watching that same mechanism fail to rein in far worse ideas, at much higher levels. ♦