This Met Gala controversy may be the most tone-deaf move she’s made. What now for Anna Wintour?

John Galliano – the fashion world’s theatrical ringmaster par excellence – has always enjoyed his contradictions, and champions.

The one-time head designer of one of France’s most storied fashion houses, Christian Dior , Galliano once quipped: “Fashion is above all an art of change.”

Yet for all his headline-grabbing and famously fantastical runway shows, he was perennially looking one way: backwards. Historicism was a hallmark of his craft. His 1997 haute couture debut for Dior, after all, celebrated the opulence of 1930s opium dens in Shanghai.

Then came this week, when he announced on social media that he would be stepping back from the highly anticipated – and controversial – planned retrospective of his work, which was to be the centrepiece of next year’s Met Gala .

The one year Galliano has tried, for decades, to leave behind, has finally caught up with him, in a way it arguably hasn’t before.

This was 2011, when a French court handed Galliano a total of €6000 ($13,565 now) in suspended fines, after he was found guilty of “public insults” based on origin, religion, race or ethnicity. This, after he was caught on film, hurling antisemitic rants at people in a Parisian bar. Among other moments of racism.

Many of fashion’s most illustrious figures have tried to rehabilitate Galliano’s image over the years.

Supermodel Kate Moss famously chose Galliano to design her wedding dress for her 2011 nuptials, telling Vogue she wanted “a classic Galliano, those chiffon Thirties kind. I’ve lived in his dresses for years, and they just make me feel so comfortable.”

But it’s arguably Vogue ’s global editorial director Anna Wintour who has acted as his rehabilitator-in-chief, reportedly smoothing the way for him to nab lucrative fashion roles, after Dior fired him.

“She’s wanted this for years, and she seemed to have gotten her way,” says Amy Odell, host of the Back Row with Amy Odell podcast, and author of Anna: The Biography , about Wintour.

Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast , Amy Odell says the cancellation of Galliano’s retrospective is about far more than Galliano’s own troubled history, revealing that the wider fashion industry is now being reigned in after years of tolerating egregious behaviour.

Click the player below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation.

Selinger-Morris: Can you just remind listeners of what John Galliano actually did? It’s about 15 years ago now … you have called Galliano previously, “the industry’s most famous antisemite”, not without good reason. What did he say and do? And what does it say about the fashion industry that he was chosen then for this in the first place?

Odell: There were two incidents, one of which was filmed and released by The Sun newspaper. In that video, Galliano was saying, “I love Hitler.” I believe that’s a direct quote. And, “Your forefathers would be gassed and dead,” something like that. And there was another incident at a café in Paris where he was drinking, and he was saying racist and antisemitic things to another couple.