Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein
Facing an intense backlash, influential fashion designer John Galliano has taken the unprecedented step of withdrawing from a planned exhibition in his honour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“After much reflection and discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” Galliano wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram page.
He also expressed “profound and enduring” gratitude to the museum’s leadership, and acknowledged the pain his past words had caused.
“I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he wrote. “I also recognise and respect that an exhibition honouring my work would be painful for some.”
In a statement Monday, Max Hollein, the director of the Met, said, “Following thoughtful discussions with John Galliano, we have together decided not to proceed with the exhibition.”
The cancellation came at a time when a number of donors and political leaders were coming forward to express their opposition to the nine-month exhibition, which had been scheduled to begin with next year’s Met Gala.
In recent days, a furor mounted over the museum’s choice to honour Galliano, who was convicted of an antisemitic hate crime by a French court in 2011. He would have been only the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition at the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion wing.
Given that the Met Gala has traditionally served as the opening night for the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, the plan risked placing the museum in the position of seeming to sanctify Galliano during an event that has become the Super Bowl of glamour.
Galliano’s departure became known on Monday, just as key members of the Met’s board of trustees were scheduled to gather for a morning meeting to discuss the fate of the exhibition. Museum leadership had also called a Zoom meeting of the board for Monday at 4pm to “focus on a discussion of the Costume Institute,” according to an email invitation that was shared with The New York Times.
On Friday, The New York Times quoted Jewish leaders who spoke out against the planned exhibition. They included Arne Glimcher, an art world titan who threatened to cut the museum out of his will; Julie Menin, the speaker of the City Council; and Elisha Wiesel, the chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation.
The Met is one of the 39 arts institutions operating on city-owned property, and it receives millions of dollars of annual support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Its ties to the city made its decision to honour Galliano a political issue.
Menin sent a letter to Met leadership late last week, becoming the first local politician to oppose the planned Galliano exhibition. In an interview Sunday, Menin, a Democrat, called the since-cancelled show “a gut punch to the Jewish community in our city, who are already reeling”.
In 2011, a French tribunal ruled that Galliano had made hateful remarks about Jews and Asians in two incidents at a bar near his home in Paris. At roughly the same time, a video circulated showing Galliano saying “I love Hitler” and telling appalled patrons that “your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed”.
He was fired from his job as the creative director of Dior, a post he had held for 15 years when the video surfaced. In 2014, after Galliano had gone through a stint in rehab and discussed Judaism and its history with rabbis and the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, he became the creative director of Maison Margiela and was reembraced by the fashion world.
Brad Lander, a Democratic congressional candidate from Brooklyn, was among the politicians who came forward in recent days to criticise the Met’s plan to honour Galliano, calling it “a bad mistake”.
“This seems very straightforward to me,” Lander said on Sunday. “They should cancel the show and change the Met Gala honoree.”
Those critics were joined by Alice Tisch, a prominent donor to the museum. On Friday, as the backlash mounted, Tisch sent an email to Hollein, the museum’s director.
“This exhibit bespeaks a failure of governance,” Tisch wrote.
She went on to call the planned exhibition a “whitewash,” adding that “it is not in the museum’s interest to have this perception out there, and it flies in the face of your rich curatorial history and ongoing fiscal and moral leadership.”
On the watch of Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast and a museum trustee, the Met Gala has become a star-studded benefit, with celebrities seated among billionaires at tables costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As Wintour’s presence at the museum has grown, so has that of Condé Nast, a regular sponsor of the Costume Institute exhibitions. Last year, the Met announced that the 11,500-square-foot space off the Great Hall would have a new name: the Condé M Nast Galleries.
The Met was aware that a show in honour of the designer, a longtime Wintour favourite, might cause a backlash. Before committing to the exhibition, Galliano met with Jewish leaders in gatherings arranged in part by Wintour and Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute.
Most of the Jewish leaders came away satisfied that Galliano was sufficiently repentant for the hateful remarks he had made. When news of the exhibition became public, Wintour told the Times, “There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano.” She added: “His career isn’t defined by a single moment.”
But others questioned why the museum had decided to honour him at a time of rising antisemitism. Angela W Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, a reform synagogue in Manhattan, was even invited to be on the host committee of the gala by Wintour but declined.
Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, delivered a statement on Sunday: “John Galliano’s repeated use of antisemitic language is vile. The Mamdani administration recognises that the Met’s decision to honour him has caused pain and anger among many Jewish New Yorkers. The Met is an independent institution and its decisions – and how it responds to the many Jewish New Yorkers appalled by this choice – are ultimately its own. But independence does not mean insulation from criticism.”
On Monday, the Met issued a statement: “Information on a new spring Costume Institute exhibition and the 2027 Met Gala will be announced at a later date.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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