Did Anna Wintour, Vogue’s long-serving fashion titan and ringmaster of the annual Met Gala, meet her match in Julie Menin, the speaker of New York’s city council?
The museum is the crown jewel of the wealthy neighborhood and some residents hold significant sway at the institution, financially and in terms of the art they plan to bequeath to it. So when it was announced late in July on a Friday afternoon that Galliano would be the focus of the Met Gala next year, it left many stunned.
The designer, whose astonishing creativity as designer at Givenchy and later Dior in the 90s is not in question, had been videotaped in a Paris bar in 2011 abusing tourists in a drunken, antisemitic rant. “I love Hitler,”he slurred, and indicated their forebears should have been gassed.
Galliano was dispatched to rehab, sought corrective instruction from Jewish leaders and picked up a conviction for making hateful remarks about Jews and Asians. He got sober, apologized and made amends. He visited Auschwitz and gingerly resumed his career, though not at the top of a Parisian design house.
Wintour stood by him, using her power through job placements and a documentary, produced by Vogue parent Condé Nast, that placed equal attention on his creative life as on the scandal and its aftermath. Many of fashion’s powerful business executives were drafted in to attest to the designer’s restoration of spirit.
Water under the bridge then? Not so fast. The extraordinary mess that has unfolded around the Met and New York’s social elite over the last 10 day – in which history, racism, global politics, clothes design and institutional and personal power intertwine – is going to take time to unpick.
Wintour, according to friends, is sad that people show little forgiveness and acknowledges that she made a crucial misstep by announcing her gala 2027 pick without passing the idea through the Met’s 100-member board. But it was left to Galliano to decline Wintour’s invitation for a career-retrospective.
“I remain fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past,” he said, adding: “I understand that meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition, institutional recognition or a single public gesture.”
Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue and now chief content officer of corporate parent Condé Nast as well as a Met trustee, said in a notably brief statement that Galliano’s decision to step away from the celebration was “courageous” and “the right decision”.
Opposing forces, their thinking crystalized in a letter of protest published by Menin, were by then in full revolt. Arne Glimcher, head of Pace Gallery, had informed the Met he was reconsidering gifting the museum 50 pieces of art. “I don’t think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to come,” Glimcher wrote in an email to David Breslin, the Met curator in charge of the modern and contemporary art department.
Alice Tisch, head of a powerful New York real estate family, sent a letter to Max Hollein, the Met director, calling the exhibit a “whitewash” of a “known” antisemite. Her letter, according to the Times, said the Galliano show “bespeaks a failure of governance as it seems you are unduly influenced and directed by a corporate donor and commercial enterprise, and mining it all for financial gain”.
Menin, as the first Jewish speaker of the city council and a moderate Democrat who has emerged as a tempering counter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressivism, wrote to Wintour, Hollein and Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute, said that cultural institutions, and particularly those like the Met that receive funding from the city, “have a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry consequences”.
But none of this occurs in a vacuum. Upper East Side synagogues have been picketed by anti-Israel protesters, despite laws making it a crime to block entry to a house of worship. Last month, 63-year-old Larry Montes was hit with federal hate crime charges for violently disturbing a service at Central Synagogue, on Lexington Avenue near East 55th Street, 20 blocks from the Met.
“This is not just about the antisemitism or protests outside synagogues, honoring Galliano while Jews are being attacked is just bad judgment. The Met was not obligated to become a participant in his rehabilitation campaign by throwing a celebrity gala in his honor,” says Gerard Filitti, senior council at The Lawfare Project.
“The issue is not about separating the art from the artist,” Filitti said, and doubted that the exhibition’s planned “orientation gallery” would correct the issue. “The gala chose to make Galliano the centerpiece. So it was not conferring art and culture, it was conferring privilege,” he said.
There are misgivings about the Met Gala, too. The business it brings to hotels is welcome but it ties up the neighborhood with street closures and limousines and, in recent years, attracts protests. The exhibition itself is rarely reviewed except as a costume party – fashion industry’s biggest night – and it’s a major promotions night for Wintour’s hand-picked guest list.
Upper East Side society figures, who have largely been supplanted by celebrities at the gala itself, privately say they grew fed up with Wintour phoning to ask what they planned to wear.
Fashion is often accused of existing in vacuum, but it’s also a popular one, even if fans can no longer afford the designs and the industry has been in recession for several years. The Devil Wears Prada 2, released this summer and with a main character inspired by Wintour (played by Meryl Streep), made $692m globally. The Costume Institute raised $42m at its most recent, and also controversial, Jeff and Lauren Bezos sponsored gala.
But that sum, which is used to buy clothes for the collection, is a slender figure compared with the $125m donation made in 2021 by financier Oscar Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu-Tang.
The late cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder pledged in 2013 to give 78 cubist works to the museum, valued conservatively at $1bn, and plans have been announced to merge the Lauder’s Neue Galerie of 20th-century Austrian and German art with the Met in 2028. It’s unlikely that the ultra-rich of fashion, including LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, will donate to the Met – they have their own museums.
Galliano is later this month set to release a collaboration with Zara, the Spanish clothing chain with revenues of nearly $30.1bn. If there are lines around the block, as expected, they will serve as proof that the furore around his now-cancelled retrospective means little to many ordinary fashion fans.
An outpouring of personal support from prominent “creatives”, models, stylists, fellow designers and photographers on his Instagram page suggest the Met drama falls flat with some of them, too. The New York Times, which has led reporting deeply on the growing backlash, asked in two separate editorials last week if the Met was cancelling the fashionista and if it is Wintour, not Galliano, who should be shown the door, perhaps along with the party itself.
“The exhibition should not have been canceled,” wrote Robin Givhan in the Times. “Instead, the Met Gala should have been canceled.” Bret Stephens, also in the Times, offered that it is, in principle, “best to separate judgments about an artist from judgments about the art”.
Stephens noted the date of the gala coincided with Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Whoops,” he wrote. “High fashion and good judgment rarely coincide.” It was not the museum’s job to act as a “contextualizer” and floated that “perhaps there’s another fashionista the Met could have canceled”.
Others said the debacle was “only possible because of Anna’s power”. A Vogue former colleague described their sense of schadenfreude: “Given that she’s spent the last 20 years purging everyone who was too old and too well paid it would be poetic if she got fired.”
A standoff now exists between Wintour, 76, and Menin, 58. Officially, the exhibition “will not proceed as planned”. But Wintour, 76, via Vogue, said it has been “postponed”. Menin’s office points to a line in her statement that leaves the door ajar: “There are indeed more appropriate ways in which The Met could instead feature his work, including through a contextual exhibit or educational program.”
But that leaves no room for a Galliano-themed gala and no room to prove the one axiomatic rule of fashion: that there’s no problem that can’t be solved with an outfit change. Two years after Galliano was arrested in Paris, he was photographed in New York in what appeared to some to be an Hasidic costume – a rounded large hat, short trousers and curled long sideburns.
His publicist offered a list of the clothes he selected that day – a Stephen Jones hat, Yohji Yamamoto trousers, Brooks Brothers shirt, Dolce & Gabbana vest. “In other words – fashionable,” she said. “The last thing on John’s mind would be to do anything that would offend the Jewish community.”
