What to know
- The 2027 Met Gala and accompanying Costume Institute exhibition will centre on highly influential but controversial designer John Galliano.
- Galliano was fired by fashion house Dior in 2011 after making antisemitic remarks. In 2015, he returned as creative director of Maison Margiela.
- Toronto fashion editor Isabel Slone says Galliano deserves to be honoured for his work, but his controversial history shouldn’t be separated from his legacy.
- Anna Wintour’s decision renews questions about how major cultural institutions celebrate legendary artists with deeply controversial histories.
In 2011, fashion house Christian Dior fired creative director John Galliano for wildly anti-semitic remarks. In the years that followed, he was exiled by the fashion world. He didn’t return to working in fashion until 2015.
Which is why when Anna Wintour unveiled “John Galliano: Horizons” as the 2027 Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Gala theme, the fashion industry and fashion enthusiasts on social media were collectively baffled.
Over the years, the Costume Gala — known colloquially as the Met Gala — has never shied away from controversy. In 2023, Wintour chose to honour the late Karl Lagerfeld, who was known in the fashion industry for being fatphobic, anti-immigrant, and making light of the #MeToo movement.
While Galliano was considered a fashion supernova from the 1980s through 2011, celebrated for his ornate, theatrical runway designs that were ahead of their time, his career was derailed after he was caught making antisemitic remarks. In 2011, a video emerged where he told a woman sitting across from him at a bar in Paris, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead today.”
He is arguably as remembered for this outburst as he is for his entire fashion career.
Can fashion celebrate Galliano’s work without ignoring his past?
Isabel Slone is the arts and culture editor for Toronto Life and has written for publications like the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and Vox. She says despite Galliano’s shortcomings, he is “an important cultural figure” who doesn’t need to be erased from history.
“I don’t need the people whose art I enjoy looking at to be spotless, perfect people and I don’t think Galliano deserves to be stricken from the historical record because he made antisemitic comments 15 years ago,” Slone explains.
She believes Galliano’s work as a designer has been impactful enough to deserve a Met Gala exhibition dedicated to him, but says celebrating the work shouldn’t mean sanitizing the person behind it.
“…As a complicated figure, it’s important to assess his full legacy. That means contending with those comments and not choosing to ignore them just because it’s convenient,” Slone tells Now Toronto.
“It’ll be interesting to see how the Met presents the incident in the context of his career — if they choose to show it as a turning point, or to diminish its importance in the grand scheme of things.”
The show always goes on
Wintour choosing to honour Galliano brings up another point critics have been making for years, especially in the lead-up to this year’s Met Gala, which was co-chaired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos.
Naysayers on social media have equated the Met Gala to feeling like the Hunger Games, where rich celebrities dress up in fancy clothing regular people can’t afford.
To that comparison, Slone says the frivolity has also been the point when it comes to the Met Gala. She says it’s always been “entertaining to gawp and gawk at the costumes coming down the red (or pink) carpet.”
“We are living in a time of great uncertainty and upheaval, but when it comes to the Met Gala, the show will always go on. You can enjoy looking at the costumes or not; it’s really up to you.”
