What the Met’s John Galliano Reversal Reveals

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.”