The Metropolitan Museum of Art is facing a growing backlash because of its plan to honor John Galliano, the accomplished British fashion designer who was convicted of a hate crime by a French court in 2011 for his antisemitic outbursts.
Galliano, who transformed Dior into a global powerhouse before his disgrace, is scheduled to be the subject of a nine-month exhibition sponsored by the Met’s Costume Institute. The show is to kick off with the Met Gala, the annual springtime benefit and red carpet extravaganza overseen by Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director and a Met trustee.
Amid the public criticism, Met trustees and board members have been scrambling to do damage control. For starters, they are mulling whether to move the date of the next Met Gala from its usual slot, the first Monday in May, to the week after. In 2027, Yom HaShoah, also known as Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, will fall on the scheduled party date.
In recent days, opposition to the museum’s plan to honor Galliano has grown among Jewish leaders in New York and beyond. Donors have contacted Met executives and threatened to rescind gifts to the museum if the exhibition moves forward as planned. They have reached out to Wintour, Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute, and Max Hollein, the museum’s director.
Julie Menin, the speaker of the City Council, and one of the most senior Jewish officials in city government, called the museum’s decision to highlight Galliano’s career “a serious mistake” in a letter she sent on Thursday to Hollein, Bolton and Wintour.
“Our cultural institutions, particularly those that receive funding from the City of New York, have a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry consequences,” Menin wrote in the letter, which was shared with The New York Times by a museum official. “Words matter, and whom we choose to elevate is a direct statement of our values and what we are willing to tolerate.”
Menin then urged the museum to reconsider its decision to sponsor the exhibition. Reached by phone, she declined to comment.
In a statement on Friday, Hollein said: “The Met has no tolerance for antisemitism, racism or prejudice of any kind. We are in close consultation with Jewish leaders and other stakeholders, and we take the concerns we’ve heard very seriously.”
He added that Met leadership “is developing a thoughtful plan for next year’s exhibition and gala that meets the moral and ethical standards set by the museum.”
Menin was not the only high-profile figure to confront the museum. Arne Glimcher, the art world titan, recently sent an email critical of the plan to Hollein and David Breslin, a Met curator.
“I don’t think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to come,” Glimcher wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Times. He added that he and his wife “are seriously reconsidering other works that have been earmarked from our collection to the Met in our wills.”
Jill Kargman, a longtime member of Friends of the Costume Institute, a patron group, said she was stepping down from her role because of the show.
David Ingber, the senior director for Jewish life and senior director of the Bronfman Center at 92NY and the founding rabbi of the Romemu synagogue, said the museum had created a thorny problem. “By centering Galliano,” he said, “the Met has put the Jewish community in a no-win position. Either we are blamed for being overly sensitive and not allowing him to be honored or we are complicit. The question is not whether they can do this, but whether they should have.”
In 2011, a French tribunal determined that Galliano had made hateful remarks about Jews and Asians in two separate incidents at a bar in Paris. At roughly the same time, The Sun, a London tabloid, published a video of another barroom tirade in which Galliano said “I love Hitler” and told certain patrons that “your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed.” He was fired from his job as the creative director of Dior, a post he had held for 15 years, when the video surfaced.
Galliano, who attributed his rants to an addiction to drugs and alcohol, apologized for his remarks. He entered rehab and went on to study with Rabbi Barry Marcus in London. He also met with Abraham Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, to learn about Judaism, antisemitism and the Holocaust.
In 2014, he became the creative director of Maison Margiela, a post he held for a decade. His last show for the brand, a couture collection in 2024, was the most celebrated of the year, and celebrities including Zendaya and Kim Kardashian wore his creations to that year’s Met Gala.
Wintour, the global chief content officer and artistic director at Condé Nast, stood by Galliano through his ordeal. She helped him get the job at Maison Margiela and appeared in “High & Low — John Galliano,” a 2023 documentary produced in part by Condé Nast. In the film, Galliano called his antisemitic remarks “foul” and “horrific.”
Last month, when the Met’s plan to honor him became public, Wintour said, “There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano.” She added: “His career isn’t defined by a single moment.”
The Met was aware that its decision to honor him was fraught. In an effort to pre-empt a backlash, Galliano, Wintour and Bolton met with rabbis from New York City temples, as well as Jonathan Greenblatt, the current chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, over the last year. Most of the Jewish leaders came away satisfied that Galliano’s repentance was genuine, they told The Times. They were further assured that the exhibition would frankly address the issue of his hate speech.
In a statement on Friday, Bolton said that “no critical assessment” of the designer’s career “can be complete without a direct account of his failings.” “Whether Galliano can be forgiven is not a question the exhibition seeks to answer,” Bolton added.
Wintour said in a statement of her own: “From the beginning, Andrew has approached the exhibition collaboratively, and with sensitivity and rigorous scholarship. As always, I am very appreciative and supportive of him, Max and the Met.”
Ingber, who was not present for the meetings of the rabbis, Met leadership and the designer, was not persuaded of the planned exhibition’s value. “In a moment of growing antisemitic hostility, placing Galliano at the center of a great cultural spectacle communicates more than just an artistic examination of his work,” he said.
“I absolutely believe in the arc of redemption,” Ingber continued. “But repentance and forgiveness and an enormous public honor are different things.” Many congregants have approached him, he said, asking, “‘Why now?’ What the Met is thinking is the central question.” He added that in his view, Hollein should be front and center in explaining the institution’s decision to highlight Galliano’s fashion-world accomplishments.
Galliano would be only the third living designer to be granted a solo exhibition by the Costume Institute. The reason for a retrospective at this stage of his career is unclear.
Though he has not held a fashion show in two years, it is likely that he will continue to work. Why not wait until his arc can be fully assessed?
Elisha Wiesel, son of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel and the leader of his father’s charitable foundation, said on Thursday that the decision to honor Galliano “seems like a pretty bad idea.”
“If someone had screamed the worst racial epithet you can imagine, said, ‘You’re a horrible Black person and your ancestors would have been hung from a tree,’ you could not imagine them being honored by a prominent cultural institution.” It would not matter, he added, if the person had apologized for such remarks.
Wiesel seemed skeptical that Galliano’s history of antisemitic remarks would be meaningfully addressed in the planned exhibition. He predicted that it would amount to some wall text in the middle of a show devoted to “black-tie archival couture and a carefully managed encounter with antisemitism.”
Julie Macklowe, a Manhattan social fixture who has attended the Met Gala on numerous occasions, called the decision to honor Galliano a “total disgrace.” She added that she was especially troubled because Galliano “made very antisemitic remarks even recently.”
Macklowe was referring to an incident said to have occurred in 2019. An account of it was described in an Aug. 1 post on Facebook by Lauren London, a fashion publicist.
The encounter, London said in an interview with The Times, took place in the summertime at the alcohol-free Henri Chenot spa in Merano, Italy. She was sitting in a common area with her friend Sabine Cimber Goldberg.
Goldberg was on the phone with her daughter. Galliano was sitting nearby. When Goldberg switched from speaking English to Hebrew, Galliano began shouting “Merry Christmas!” over and over again, London said.
“I remember him screaming it very clearly,” she said.
Her friend asked Galliano if he had a problem with her speaking Hebrew, and he said that he did, London added.
“That’s what sparked me to write something,” London said. “Because that’s what’s so troublesome: I kept reading that the Met is going to to call attention to his antisemitic remarks, as if it was some sort of footnote, this little part of him that’s been cured. And from what I saw, that is not the case.”
Responding to questions over Instagram, Goldberg confirmed the 2019 incident, adding: “I was in shock. I was on a video call with my daughter.” In a separate interview by phone, her daughter, Kelly Goldberg, confirmed hearing part of Galliano’s rant.
In response to queries from The Times, a spokesman for Galliano said, “John denies this ever happened.”
The writer Andrew Solomon, who is a member of the Met board, plans to host a gathering at his home, where he will speak with Galliano before a group of trustees and donors. Solomon, a supporter of the scheduled exhibition, said that “confronting cancel culture is a healthier way to go forward than bowing to it.”
In recent days, trustees had pressured Wintour and Bolton to distance the 2027 Met Gala from Galliano by keeping his name out of the dress code and off the invitation. That would be in sharp contrast to the benefit’s treatment of Karl Lagerfeld in 2023. That year, Lagerfeld was honored with a Costume Institute show, and gala attendees were asked to dress in his honor.
Wintour has raised so much money for the Costume Institute that it renamed its basement galleries after her. Her championing of Galliano and her power at the Met now face a test. Amid the growing public criticism, the outcome is unclear.
David Wolpe, the emeritus rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, called the Met Gala a “moral travesty” in a recent Substack essay. After he posted it, he said, an acquaintance asked him, “‘Aren’t you afraid of Anna Wintour?’”
“I thought: That is such a sad symptom of spinelessness in a community that has seen people who have courage in much more difficult situations than just ‘Oh, I might be blackballed at the Met,’” Wolpe said.
Asked how he would advise a congregant on whether to join the gala’s host committee, he said he would recommend against it.
“You’re lending your name to something that is unworthy of you,” Wolpe said. “Whatever the frisson you feel because of the party is not worthy of the stain on your soul.”
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