The Met’s Other Failure

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s announcement this week that it is canceling next year’s exhibition on the fashion of John Galliano perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

From the start, Galliano was a controversial pick for the museum’s Costume Institute, which launches its new show each year with the splashy Met Gala.

In 2011, he lost his job as creative director of Dior after a video surfaced of him making a drunken anti-Semitic rant; later that year, a French court found him guilty of the crime of making anti-Semitic and anti-Asian insults.

The New York Times recently described claims that Galliano had made anti-Semitic comments more recently, during an outburst in 2019. (Through a spokesperson, Galliano denied the 2019 episode.) But not long after his Dior exit, Galliano—who has always traded on his bad-boy image while producing clothes of astounding beauty and theatricality—was welcomed back into the industry.

After so publicly hitting rock-bottom, the designer, who said addiction to drugs and alcohol led to the rants, apologized and went to rehab.

Maison Margiela then hired him.

Celebrities such as Zendaya wore his designs; this year, fast-fashion retailer Zara announced a partnership with him to great excitement.

Anna Wintour, Vogue ’s global editorial director and the Met Gala’s chair, also happens to be his longtime friend and champion.

In the process of planning the Met show, Galliano, Wintour, and Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, consulted with Jewish leaders, and the exhibition itself intended to—as the museum initially announced in July—explore how the designer’s “derogatory conduct” had “fundamentally altered his career and public reception.” [ Read: Yet another wasted Met Gala ] Those efforts did little to assuage wider public opinion.

Museum donors threatened to pull funding; the speaker of the New York City Council called the choice of Galliano a “serious mistake.” On Monday, the museum released a statement saying that the show “will not proceed as planned.” It was, Wintour said in the statement, “the right decision.” It is also a blow to the museum and its reputation that could have been avoided.

For most of the Costume Institute’s 80-year history, it has followed an unofficial rule: Don’t do a solo show about a living designer—because such an exhibition could be seen as a form of advertising instead of scholarship, especially if the designer has curatorial input.

Although such shows are now commonplace, the Met’s fashion wing has always prided itself on “setting the standard” for conservation and collection, and has devoted only two exhibitions to living designers: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017.