The Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning a major exhibition next year devoted to the designer John Galliano, who became infamous for his antisemitic rants.
I feel the need to begin by saying that, as anyone who knows me is well aware, I am not a fashion expert. But I am a New Yorker.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is planning a major exhibition next year devoted to John Galliano, “one of the most inventive and influential designers of the past four decades.” Over the weekend, Galliano’s biographer, Dana Thomas (author of Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano), took to the New York Times to say it is a “terrible idea.”
Galliano pleaded guilty to antisemitic and racist rants — one including “I love Hitler” — in a French café. Thomas writes that, given this history, the Met honor — and while Galliano is still alive — is “downright bizarre”:
An independent curator told me in 2021 that he had spent years proposing a Galliano exhibition to museums across the United States and Europe. The answer, he said, was always the same: no. So was the reason: antisemitism. None of the museums wanted to take the risk of tarnishing themselves.
The Met and Anna Wintour — Vogue’s global editorial director, a Met trustee and Mr. Galliano’s greatest champion — apparently understand those concerns. At the museum in May, Mr. Galliano, Ms. Wintour and the Costume Institute’s chief curator, Andrew Bolton, met with some of New York City’s most influential rabbis and Jewish leaders to get a reading on the situation. In fact, a Galliano exhibition was originally scheduled for 2024 and was postponed following the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. Yet the subject of antisemitism is no less charged today than it was then; reported incidents have increased; debates about it have roiled state and local elections; and the Trump administration has placed it front and center in its effort to slash university research funding.
She says that “there is no definition” of antisemitism “narrow enough to exclude Galliano’s infamous outburst, in which he praised Hitler and told fellow café patrons their ancestors would have been gassed.”
And that appears to be fine for the Met and the fashion world.
Thomas continues:
Already, outrage and condemnation have flooded social media since the museum’s announcement on Friday night, and the backlash is likely to grow in the months leading up to the Met Gala on May 3. . . .
Despite all this, the Met and Ms. Wintour appear to believe they can transcend the controversy and confer upon Mr. Galliano a place in the cultural canon without irretrievably harming their own reputations. Sadly, they might be right.
It may be true that if we vetted everyone on whom we bestow honors for perfection, no one would ever be honored anywhere. But as Thomas notes, this Met honor has been given to only two other living designers, once in 1983 and once in 2017.
The people behind this decision are New Yorkers, too, and they’ve seen antisemitism growing in their city — and around the world. They’ve clearly settled for it.