Before announcing John Galliano as the subject of its starry Costume Institute exhibition opening next spring, the Metropolitan Museum of Art met with influential rabbis and Jewish leaders to discuss the selection of a figure “as famous for his antisemitic rant in 2011 as he is for his fashion,” according to the New York Times.
As reported by the Times’s chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, the Met convened several meetings between Jewish leaders and Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director and a Met trustee; Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Met’s Costume Institute; and Galliano himself. Among the Jewish leaders were Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, and rabbis from significant synagogues in New York.
The acts of diplomacy stemmed from Galliano’s notorious antisemitic diatribe in 2011, which cost him his job as creative director at Dior and has cast a shadow over his work and his legacy ever since. He returned to the fashion world as the creative director of Maison Margiela in 2014, but he remains “a thorny choice for the show at this moment,” as the Times described it.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism in North America who participated in a meeting in May, told the Times he was impressed by Galliano’s ongoing reputational-rehabilitation campaign. “The word I come back to is ‘sincerity,’” Jacobs said. “He was open. He looked right at us and spoke in a clear way, not as if he had memorized talking points.”
Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League, said, “We believe John Galliano has genuinely worked through the issues that led to his antisemitic outburst years ago in Paris, and we have long since accepted his apology. His efforts to repair the damage his words caused and to learn from that incident should be applauded.”
Bolton, the Met curator, said, “I completely understand why the timing might feel particularly difficult now, given the alarming rise of hate, but I do feel it makes the current questions more urgent—not less. For me, the larger question is not whether artistic behavior excuses transgression, but how to hold artistic achievement and ethical accountability together without allowing one to erase the other. And at a moment of heightened division, I feel the museum and myself have a real responsibility to confront these issues.”
Galliano would be just the third living fashion designer to have a Met Costume Institute show, after Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017. Bolton said the show will open with an “orientation gallery” that addresses the issues surrounding Galliano while also attesting to his talent, according to the Times. “It remains to be seen whether that attitude will extend to the broader Met audience and the Galliano show,” Friedman wrote of the show scheduled to open in May 2027. She also noted that currently “there are plans for it to travel to other museums after the Met—another rare honor—and the leaders of those institutions will undoubtedly be watching the reactions closely.”
