{"id":606756,"date":"2026-09-05T13:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T13:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/606756\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T13:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T13:48:10","slug":"what-does-mets-u-turn-on-john-galliano-augur-for-him-the-gala-and-anna-wintour-john-galliano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/606756\/","title":{"rendered":"What does Met\u2019s U-turn on John Galliano augur for him, the gala and Anna Wintour? | John Galliano"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did Anna Wintour<\/a>, Vogue\u2019s long-serving fashion titan and ringmaster of the annual Met Gala, meet her match in Julie Menin, the speaker of New York\u2019s city council?<\/p>\n

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<\/a> next year, it left many stunned.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI love Hitler,\u201dhe slurred, and indicated their forebears should have been gassed.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Wintour stood by him, using her power through job placements and a documentary, produced by Vogue parent Cond\u00e9 Nast, that placed equal attention on his creative life as on the scandal and its aftermath. Many of fashion\u2019s powerful business executives were drafted in to attest to the designer\u2019s restoration of spirit.<\/p>\n

Water under the bridge then? Not so fast. The extraordinary mess that has unfolded around the Met and New York\u2019s social elite over the last 10 day \u2013 in which history, racism, global politics, clothes design and institutional and personal power intertwine \u2013 is going to take time to unpick.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 100-member board. But it was left to Galliano to decline Wintour\u2019s invitation for a career-retrospective.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remain fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cI understand that meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition, institutional recognition or a single public gesture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue and now chief content officer of corporate parent Cond\u00e9 Nast as well as a Met trustee, said in a notably brief statement that Galliano\u2019s decision to step away from the celebration was \u201ccourageous\u201d and \u201cthe right decision\u201d.<\/p>\n

Opposing forces, their thinking crystalized in a letter of protest<\/a> 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. \u2060\u201cI don\u2019t think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to come,\u201d Glimcher wrote in an email to David Breslin, the Met curator in charge of the modern and contemporary art department.<\/p>\n

Julie Menin speaks during the Jewish Board\u2019s spring benefit at Gotham Hall in June 2026 in New York City. Photograph: Sean Zanni\/Patrick McMullan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Alice Tisch, head of a powerful New York real estate family, sent a letter to Max Hollein, the Met director, calling the exhibit a \u201cwhitewash\u201d of a \u201cknown\u201d antisemite. Her letter, according to the Times, said the Galliano show \u201cbespeaks 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\u201d.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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, \u201chave a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry consequences\u201d.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis 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,\u201d says Gerard Filitti, senior council at The Lawfare Project.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe issue is not about separating the art from the artist,\u201d Filitti said, and doubted that the exhibition\u2019s planned \u201corientation gallery\u201d would correct the issue. \u201cThe gala chose to make Galliano the centerpiece. So it was not conferring art and culture, it was conferring privilege,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 fashion industry\u2019s biggest night \u2013 and it\u2019s a major promotions night for Wintour\u2019s hand-picked guest list.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Fashion is often accused of existing in vacuum, but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Neue Galerie of 20th-century Austrian and German art with the Met in 2028. It\u2019s unlikely that the ultra-rich of fashion, including LVMH\u2019s Bernard Arnault, will donate to the Met \u2013 they have their own museums.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

An outpouring of personal support from prominent \u201ccreatives\u201d, models, stylists, fellow designers and photographers on his Instagram page<\/a> suggest the Met drama falls flat with some of them, too. The New York Times, which has led reporting deeply on the growing backlash,<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe exhibition should not have been canceled,\u201d wrote Robin Givhan in the Times.<\/a> \u201cInstead, the Met Gala should have been canceled.\u201d Bret Stephens, also in the Times, offered that it is, in principle, \u201cbest to separate judgments about an artist from judgments about the art\u201d.<\/p>\n

Stephens noted the date of the gala coincided with Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day. \u201cWhoops,\u201d he wrote. <\/a>\u201cHigh fashion and good judgment rarely coincide.\u201d It was not the museum\u2019s job to act as a \u201ccontextualizer\u201d and floated that \u201cperhaps there\u2019s another fashionista the Met could have canceled\u201d.<\/p>\n

Others said the debacle<\/a> was \u201conly possible because of Anna\u2019s power\u201d. A Vogue former colleague described their sense of schadenfreude: \u201cGiven that she\u2019s spent the last 20 years purging everyone who was too old and too well paid it would be poetic if she got fired.\u201d<\/p>\n

A standoff now exists between Wintour, 76, and Menin, 58. Officially, the exhibition \u201cwill not proceed as planned\u201d. But Wintour, 76, via Vogue, said it has been \u201cpostponed\u201d. Menin\u2019s office points to a line in her statement that leaves the door ajar: \u201cThere are indeed more appropriate ways in which The Met could instead feature his work, including through a contextual exhibit or educational program.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that leaves no room for a Galliano-themed gala and no room to prove the one axiomatic rule of fashion: that there\u2019s no problem that can\u2019t 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 \u2013 a rounded large hat, short trousers and curled long sideburns.<\/p>\n

His publicist offered a list of the clothes he selected that day<\/a> \u2013 a Stephen Jones hat, Yohji Yamamoto trousers, Brooks Brothers shirt, Dolce & Gabbana vest. \u201cIn other words \u2013 fashionable,\u201d she said. \u201cThe last thing on John\u2019s mind would be to do anything that would offend the Jewish community.\u201d<\/p>\n