The Met’s Galliano show is already controversial. Can it be done right?

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — “I love Hitler,” the designer John Galliano said to a woman across from him at a Paris bar. “People like you would be dead today.”

That was in December 2010. Galliano was a legend at the time, the British genius who had helped reinvent Givenchy and Dior. When the video of his antisemitic tirade emerged in 2011, it triggered his firing from Dior, a criminal conviction, and several years of exile from the fashion world.

Not too many years of exile, though. In 2014, Maison Margiela hired Galliano as its creative director, and he resumed sending out astonishing clothing, while minding his manners. And now, a decade and a half after his downfall and disgrace, Galliano is set to be the focus of a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

His four-decade career will be the focus of the Costume Institute’s next spring show, the annual exhibition that opens with the glitzy Met Gala on the first Monday in May. It’s an astonishing comeback that has provoked mixed reactions in the fashion world and beyond.

His return resurfaces a question that has dogged artistic and cultural institutions over the past quarter-century of reckonings over various prominent figures’ racism, sexual misconduct or other abuses of power: What do we do with great artists who do bad things?

The Met’s answer may be to address the bad things head on. The Costume Institute at the museum, which is in charge of the annual exhibit and gala, insists it’s not shying away from Galliano’s past antisemitic and racist comments. Instead, the show, titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” will “consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability,” according to a press release from the museum.

The exhibit also comes amid a spate of high-profile antisemitic attacks in the US and abroad. “At a time when so many are feeling fearful of antisemitism, it’s going to make people understandably a little discomforted in the American Jewish community,” said Nate Wolfson, the communications director for the Nexus Project, a US non-profit which works to combat antisemitism.

It also comes as other well-known figures in fashion and further afield are getting second chances.

The designer Demna, who came under fire after Balenciaga released a campaign under his tenure featuring children with teddy bears in BDSM-style gear, has since been hired as the creative director of Gucci; Kanye West, who went on a series of racist and antisemitic rants that he later attributed to an undiagnosed bipolar disorder, sold out shows at SoFi stadium in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Andrew Bolton, the longstanding Met curator who will curate the Galliano show, said in the press release that the show “considers both how Galliano has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work.”

Galliano himself has apologized for the tirade, one of multiple instances in which he made antisemitic comments. Speaking in the 2023 documentary “High & Low: John Galliano” that covered both his sensational ascent and his dramatic downfall, the designer described it as “a disgusting thing, foul thing that I did” during a haze of alcoholism and drug abuse. Galliano did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Planning for the Met show has included meetings with rabbis and Jewish leaders, according to the New York Times — in what looks like a preemptive crisis management effort to engage with the community most hurt by the designer’s comments.

Still, that doesn’t mean everyone has forgiven Galliano. Wolfson said that it’s inevitable Jewish people will have mixed feelings about the show and the designer’s reacceptance into fashion’s upper echelons. “The hope is just that they don’t sanitize it for the sake of ease. And rather really wrestle with it and make sure that it’s front and center, so people understand the disturbing past and attempt at reconciliation and growth,” he said.

A singular honor

Galliano, whose designs blur the boundaries between clothing and art, will be just the third living fashion designer to get a Met retrospective, following Rei Kawakubo in 2017, the much lauded designer behind Japanese house Comme des Garçons, and Yves Saint Laurent in 1983, the great French couturier who succeeded Christian Dior.

It’s the highest honor the Costume Institute can bestow — a true mark of just how much Galliano has permanently shaped fashion.

The Met Gala, a global fashion spectacle and one of the most-watched red carpets of the year, typically mirrors the exhibit in theme. While Galliano attends only infrequently, his creations are well worn by celebrity guests of the event, including famously by Princess Diana. In 2024, he was pictured at the “Garden of Time” party alongside Kim Kardashian, whom he dressed in a metallic Maison Margiela corset dress with sliver floral detailing.

When asked about the show, Dana Thomas, who wrote the dual biography “Gods and Kings” about Galliano and Alexander McQueen said: “Does he deserve it as a person? Questionable. Does he deserve it as a designer? Absolutely. And that’s a difficult challenge that Andrew Bolton must face.” Subsequently, in an opinion piece published in the New York Times on Thursday, she wrote, “Not all great creators deserve a retrospective, and someone as incendiary as Mr. Galliano certainly shouldn’t be the subject of one during his lifetime, when he stands to profit from the honor personally.”

Shannon Mirabelli-Lopez, a longtime Met Costume Institute curator who now works at the Cilker Design School, was less equivocal. “I think honoring his body of work through this exhibition is exceedingly fitting and not at all surprising,” she said. “His comeback has been hard fought, by him and by his supporters, and he has re-proven that his impact on fashion cannot be denied through his work at Margiela.”

The choice to honor him perhaps also speaks to the potent influence of Met Gala mastermind Anna Wintour. Wintour’s friendship with the designer dates back to the 1990s. “It isn’t often that you meet a great designer,” Wintour said in the “High & Low” documentary. “But when you saw what John was doing, you realized that he was one of them.”

Wintour said “there is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano” in a statement last week. “The exhibition won’t shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past,” she said. “It’s part of what has shaped him.” CNN reached out to Wintour’s office but she did not comment further.

Wintour, along with the late Vogue editor and stylist Andre Leon Talley, helped Galliano find his financial footing in the early days, and she’s continued to champion the designer, both as an artist and a person. When he was hired as Maison Margiela’s creative director in 2014 – his first job after being fired from Dior – it was Wintour who first stepped out in one of his pieces.

She “has been not just his ambassador, but his fairy godmother for more than 30 years,” said Thomas. “And much of what exists in his career would not have existed without her complete support, unquestioned support.”

Galliano is also far from the first controversial Met subject. Karl Lagerfeld, the longtime Chanel creative director, who was honored by the Met in 2023, made dismissive comments about #MeToo and received backlash for calling Syrian refugees Jew’s’ “worst enemies” on French television in 2017. But the exhibit materials didn’t touch on these unsavory aspects of Lagerfeld’s past – maybe a reflection of the minor impact they had, if any, on Lagerfeld’s career.

Fashion’s greatest showman

Galliano represents the last of a vanguard of designers who developed cults of personalities. The son of a plumber and a flamenco teacher, he grew up in a deeply Catholic and at times abusive family in Gibraltar and London and was educated at Central Saint Martins – the incubator for many great British designers.

There, he made a splash with a final graduation collection called “Les Incroyables” inspired by the French Revolution. It set a pattern the designer would follow throughout his career, plucking references out of disparate periods of time and remixing them with his trademark fantastical style. Galliano leaned into the celebrity his success won him, walking out at the end of his own runway shows dressed as an astronaut, or a pirate, or a matador.

Galliano’s rise came as the New Romantics movement had integrated theatrical flair into everyday dressing. A Galliano show might look more like a theater set than a runway. Looking like they might be from another century or another planet, he’s sent out models covered in blue face paint, and dressed in quasi-Papal vestments — designs so absurdly, and proudly, unwearable they were sometimes accused of bordering on costumery. However avant-garde his ideas, he won the glowing admiration of actors and models he dressed – and helped increase sales for Dior, vindicating the risky choice LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault made in hiring him.

In interviews, colleagues and friends have painted the portrait of Galliano before his downfall as a brilliant designer as well as an incorrigible drunk who trashed hotel rooms. He struggled with drinking, cocaine use, and prescription drug abuse and could be temperamental and unpredictable.

Model Marie Sophie-Wilson characterized him as “a bad drunk who really wants to get wasted until he drops” in “High & Low.” Similarly, fashion editor Tim Blanks remembered a drunken Galliano at a club, “just pissing on everybody.”

“I just thought, ‘Boy, that guy’s unhappy,’’ Blanks recalled.

Fall from grace

Galliano said in the documentary that in the early 2010s he was grappling with the constant demands of producing as many as 32 collections a year. He relied on a cocktail of drugs, prescribed and not, to get through the day. “I was committing suicide slowly,” he said. “I just wanted to sleep forever.”

In 2011, the designer was sitting at a Parisian bar when he began berating two people nearby, insulting the woman’s “ugly Jewish face” and saying to the man with her, “F**ing Asian bastard, I will kill you.” Galliano was arrested and faced a barrage of negative press but pledged to sue for defamation.

Then, the Sun published the aforementioned video of the earlier Galliano tirade from December 2010. As well as saying, “I love Hitler,” he was also captured in the clip saying, “Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f***ing gassed.”

He was promptly fired from Dior. Past collaborators and friends, including Natalie Portman, who had become the face of Dior fragrance, condemned him. Galliano claims to have little recollection of the events on video. He was “horrified, ashamed, embarrassed” to see the video, he later recalled in “High & Low.”

The designer spent two months in rehab in Arizona, then returned to Paris to face criminal charges. He was convicted of “public insults for reasons of religion, race or ethnicity” and given suspended fines of €6,000 (approximately $7,000). At the time, Galliano’s fall seemed complete: The UK’s Guardian newspaper declared it “doubtful” he would ever redeem himself.

Comeback tour

In the months after his firing, Galliano embarked on a kind of education mission, studying antisemitism and the history of the Holocaust under Rabbi Barry Marcus and meeting with a concentration camp survivor.

“He was prepared to subject himself to this process,” the rabbi said in “High & Low.” “You know, he openly said, ‘Look, I made a mistake.’ So who are we to condemn somebody who says they made a mistake?”

In 2013, Galliano received absolution from at least one major Jewish group: The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman said in a statement he wished the designer success, noting he had “worked arduously in changing his worldview and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading, and learning about the evils of anti-Semitism and bigotry.”

Galliano’s professional exile was therefore relatively short-lived. Three years after his firing, Galliano was hired as the creative director of Maison Margiela, a post he would hold for a decade.

Galliano in his Margiela era was quieter and lower-profile than the party- boy figure he’d struck in the 1990s. He gave few interviews and said in the documentary that he maintained sobriety for more than a decade. But his work continued to turn heads, including a 2024 show for Margiela that featured actor Gwendoline Christie in an awe-inspiring vinyl corset dress and a distinctive “glass skin” look by Pat McGrath that sparked a social media trend.

And archive Galliano continues to pop up on the red carpet today, worn by stars like Zendaya and Margot Robbie.

The 2023 documentary, which included candid reflection from Galliano and revealed how addiction unraveled his life, helped shift public opinion in the designer’s favor.

In another signal of the completion of Galliano’s comeback, the designer inked a 2-year partnership with Spanish fast fashion brand Zara, set to launch with the first batch of products in September, as the company works to elevate its image and attract higher-end customers.

Galliano’s return, according to Mirabelli-Lopez, is a sign of the fashion industry’s ability to “hold creatives accountable without discounting their influence on culture.”

“For better or worse, we tend to make a lot of room for moral failures when it comes to genius, as many industries, creative and otherwise, have done throughout history,” she said.

How we remember

With the Met show announced, the question remains: Can the Costume Institute get it right?

While the details are still coming together at this early stage, Bolton, the curator, has said that he plans to make what the Met press release called a “rupture” a critical part of the exhibit’s opening section. CNN asked the Met for more information about the planned exhibit but Bolton was unavailable for an interview at the time of publication.

Wolfson suggested the exhibit could integrate the video of Galliano’s rant directly, alongside commentary on it. Above all, he said, the focus should be on education: “It’s not just educating that he did something wrong, which of course he did. But educating about the environment that produced that wrongdoing, what can lead someone to believing that?”

Thomas said the show, rather than being reducible to “ogling at opulent gowns for rich women,” should be “about culture, society, and what we accept today and what is not acceptable today.”

The question of how to deal with the Met Gala – known as “fashion’s big night out” – is thorny, said Thomas. A show that sincerely grapples with Galliano’s history might require a more somber, low-key tone for the event. Thomas suggested the organizers would be smart to bring on Jewish co-chairs – perhaps even Natalie Portman.

For Bolton, the show represents a “huge challenge,” said Thomas. “Nobody will ever take what he does seriously again if he doesn’t pull this off.”

In the past, fashion and art institutions have struggled to properly reflect their subjects’ prejudiced pasts. Just look at Coco Channel, who collaborated with the Nazi intelligence service and the Vichy regime. A blockbuster Chanel exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from 2023 to 2024 mentioned Chanel’s ties to the Nazis relatively briefly, and included new documents that suggest she joined the French Resistance in January 1943.

Or consider the Impressionist master Edgar Degas, who disavowed Jewish friends and colleagues after the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish French officer was wrongly convicted of treason, inflaming antisemitism and opening a massive rift in French intellectual society. A Degas retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 omitted the painter’s history of antisemitism entirely, according to writer and art critic Christopher Benfey.

Benfey said that it was crucial to hold both truths at once: That Degas was an amazing and influential painter, and that he was an antisemite. One can’t obfuscate the other.

“I don’t believe that there’s some clear separation between art and social, cultural history,” he said. “You want to see it all. You want to see it all whole.”

Mirabelli-Lopez is optimistic about the Galliano show. She said she expects Bolton to “address Galliano’s failures and successes the way he approaches every exhibition’s subject:” with “intelligence and sensitivity.”

Still, she said: “I am sure it will disappoint or upset some people, as great curators and artists always do.”

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