Galliano galls, but cancelling his Met retrospective hurts Jews

A 2013 Vanity Fair spread about British designer John Galliano's top fashion moments includes the following caption: 'In the wake of scandal, Galliano's close friend Kate Moss commissioned him to design the wedding dress for her upcoming marriage to the Kills' Jamie Hince. The dreamy, gold-accented gown made its public and highly stylized debut in 2011's September issue of Vogue, which Moss covered.' The dress itself is not one of Galliano's more outlandish designs. Rather, it's noteworthy in the context of Moss asking Galliano to design her gown. There's no mention of what this 'scandal' consisted of. Absent any context, one might think it was something a bit sexy, or perhaps merely that Galliano had been the innocent victim of something unfortunate. That impression would only be encouraged by the next and final image caption, which begins, 'Moss wasn't the only industry peer to reach out to Galliano. In January 2012, designer Oscar de la Renta extended an invitation for Galliano to take up a temporary, if unofficial, residency in his atelier—an offer Galliano immediately accepted.' The wording—'reach out'—makes Galliano sound like this majestic creature, wronged by the cruel world. It gives the impression that he'd had a nervous breakdown or something, which is at best a partial truth. *** As The New York Times, the JTA, and other outlets have reported, Galliano was going to get a retrospective exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The museum's annual Met Gala was poised to launch this exhibit, and now, no. Much of this is due to events that went down in 2010 and 2011. The alluded-to 'scandal.' What happened was this: Galliano was convicted of a hate crime, in France, for two instances of antisemitic abuse, one also involving racist abuse against an Asian man, in a Paris café, La Perle. These were in addition to a separate incident where Galliano was recorded at his apparent preferred haunt for this sort of thing, professing his admiration for Hitler. A kind of Ye-avant-la-lettre, or Chanel-après. I well remember the whole thing because I was in Paris at the time, doing dissertation research on, in part, French antisemitism. I remember walking by La Perle en route to archives or pastry shops or whatever and thinking, ah yes, the place where Galliano did his antisemitisms. There are a few key things to keep in mind about the context here. First, 2011 was pre-cancel-culture, pre-social-media as it exists today. To become controversial, you generally had to be rather famous to start with, and to do something outrageous. In 2011, nobody was digging through old photos to see if D-list celebrities' old Halloween costumes had been culturally appropriative. That there was footage of such incidents at all was itself new, as digital cameras and then smartphones entered the scene. But 2011 was not a time when the mere fact of an intoxicated person acting out racistly would capture a news cycle. Next, there's the fact of all this happening in France, which has both its own laws regarding hate speech and its own specific history of complicity in the Nazi genocide. The café where Galliano had antisemitic outbursts is in Paris's historically Jewish Marais district, not far from the Holocaust memorial. In France, but also in fashion. The schmatte industry is not one in which maligning of Jews will go unnoticed. Last and most important in a 2026 context is the specific nature of what Galliano said. Yes, we are in the famous times of rising antisemitism. But where does Galliano fit into that picture? There'd be no way whatsoever to interpret his remarks or actions as criticisms of Israel. Moreover, the anti-Asian part of one of his tirades meant the incident fell squarely into the category of racism-and-antisemitism, which is in some ways simpler to combat than antisemitism on its lonesome. France literally has a League Against Racism and Antisemitism, and therefore comes equipped to handle cases where someone's Jew-hatred is bundled with racial animus against additional groups. Galliano is therefore in some ways an easy target for anyone looking to combat antisemitism distilled. In other ways (he was a mess, he is a celebrated mad-genius) not so much. When I look back at my own old blog posts (and gosh but there were a bunch!) from the time, I was far more on the go cancel him side of things than I would have been had I known all that I know today, about how that works as a strategy. I also think I'd have been more willing to consider that maybe he really was in a bad way mentally, as versus an antisemite doing excuses-excuses. At the same time, past-me got some things right. Returning to those posts reminded me of how absolutely frustrating it felt at the time, to see the fashion crowd dwell on Galliano's 'genius' as an excuse for his behaviour. To see them doing this, that is, not after some time had passed, in the immediate aftermath of his actions-and-consequences. Imperfect analogy: it's like the people who insisted, right after the Oct. 7 attacks, that Israel had responded disproportionately to Hamas. If you start on the 'enough punishment, already' line of thought the moment a bad actor gets any punishment at all, you do rather lose credibility. It starts to become clearer where cancel culture came from, when you see how things went circa 2011, where a beloved celebrity could say or do awful things and everyone would just sort of shrug, and call you bourgeois and uptight if you objected. Given the bourgeois-and-uptight full rein was an overcorrection, but those posts reminded me why a correction was needed. *** When I saw that Galliano was going to be honoured with a 2027 retrospective, I suppose I lumped it together with a general mood, among the fashionable, among the finger-on-pulse-havers, that Jews were so last season, dahling. The young people are antisemites now, and fashion is the veneration of youth. What could be more of-the-moment, then, than to celebrate a creator held back from the pinnacle of success by those pesky Jews? Does it follow, then, that I was advocating for the Met to change its plans? I was not. I have no plans to attend the gala (they keep not inviting me, funny that) but this seemed like a case where cancelling would backfire. The dynamics are well-expressed by one of the sources in Times coverage from prior to the cancellation itself: 'David Ingber, the senior director for Jewish life and senior director of the Bronfman Center at 92NY and the founding rabbi of the Romemu synagogue, said the museum had created a thorny problem. 'By centering Galliano,' he said, 'the Met has put the Jewish community in a no-win position. Either we are blamed for being overly sensitive and not allowing him to be honored or we are complicit. The question is not whether they can do this, but whether they should have.'' It seemed not even an awkward question to me, at first, whether Jews should advocate for the show's cancellation. It's not just that such things backfire, but this is a man whose errors were long ago, under the influenced, and formally atoned for. He had lost his longtime job at Dior, and paid the French fine for being racist in a café. The celebration of Galliano seemed extremely telling about the times we're in, as well as a hint at where Condé Nast or the Met or whichever other entities think the real money is (and I don't know the precise answer, just, not with Jews!) but also like something there'd be neither a way nor a reason to protest. And the stuff about the Met Gala being on Yom HaShoah I—unsurprisingly—didn't think was here or there. This is an annual event, typically held the first Monday of May. If something is bigotry, it's bigotry, whether it happens on a holiday or awareness day. There's no universe in which it would be fine to do a Galliano retrospective as long as it didn't launch on the day for remembering the Holocaust. It struck me as absurd, involving panels of rabbis and Jewish leaders and such, as though there's some centralized way of determining whether The Jews forgive Galliano. Ridiculous but also presumptuous. This is surely something individual Jews interested in this story can determine for ourselves. But also, the Galliano Sanhedrin had deemed him sufficiently remorseful, and this was as good a path as any out of the cancel-culture trap. Then I read about the 2019 alleged incident: 'The encounter, [fashion publicist Lauren] London said in an interview with The Times, took place in the summertime at the alcohol-free Henri Chenot spa in Merano, Italy. She was sitting in a common area with her friend Sabine Cimber Goldberg. Goldberg was on the phone with her daughter. Galliano was sitting nearby. When Goldberg switched from speaking English to Hebrew, Galliano began shouting 'Merry Christmas!' over and over again, London said. 'I remember him screaming it very clearly,' she said. Her friend asked Galliano if he had a problem with her speaking Hebrew, and he said that he did, London added.' Galliano denies having done this. It is, however, both so weird and specific as to come across as credible, and in keeping with what his biographer Dana Thomas had to say in an August New York Times op-ed, when the exhibit was announced but not yet cancelled, urging the Met to reconsider: 'His infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration. From his early days as a struggling designer in London and Paris through his time at the heights of the fashion industry, Mr. Galliano was known to be verbally abusive to employees, friends and strangers alike.' And Thomas anticipates the obvious comeback: that the greats are often art monsters: 'The fashion business has long been known to tolerate bad behavior; addiction, provocation and eccentricity are seen as normal, and at times necessary, elements of the creative process. Mr. Galliano's comportment went way beyond all that.' Thomas gives concrete examples of Galliano behaving in unusually rude or erratic ways. This got me speculating: If Galliano is aware that this is the kind of thing he's been known to do—whether just to Jews or more widely—then he might want to get ahead of further shoes dropping. He might know, as a Graham Platner would have pre-downfall, that he was basically a walking red flag. If he knows he's been antagonistic in his day-to-day life, then maybe a self-cancellation of sorts saves him embarrassment. Saves him embarrassment, and also allows him to look the dignified martyr. *** The story as I interpret it is one of an ongoing power struggle. Yes, Met donors have power, but they're not the only ones. Galliano has, in his corner, Anna Wintour, the fashion industry's number one power broker, the inspiration for Meryl Streep's mean-boss character in The Devil Wears Prada. (The Anne Hathaway character, for her part, was based on novelist Lauren Weisberger, who's Jewish, though there's no indication that Wintour was particularly scary towards her Jewish underlings.) Wintour, but also the fashion-industry A-list more generally. Far from ostracizing him, the fashion crowd viewed him as a troubled genius. His supporters, reports Jacob Gallagher of The New York Times, include some Jews, among them Marc Jacobs, a man who, confusingly for this story, looks remarkably similar to John Galliano. Is there a higher plane of artistic merit according to which Galliano is in a class of his own? I'm sure he's gifted, but he also has a bunch of well-connected people in his corner, and that's a big part of the equation here. And something can happen where people who act art-monsterish get the genius treatment more than they would if producing the exact same work while not being insufferable. But I'm prepared to take the word of those more attuned to the nuances of high fashion that Galliano is unusually brilliant. Even Hen Mazzig, whose husband works in fashion, calls Galliano, 'one of the most gifted designers alive.' And even if Galliano had all the fashion sense of a turnip, the optics of cancelling his retrospective are not good. The spectre of Jewish donors, threatening to withhold money if the exhibit would proceed, is both understandable on the donors' part (for it's their money, and why should they be obligated to spend it on honouring a questionably repentant Hitler admirer?) and easy fodder for Jewish conspiracy theorists. You can wish (and I, like David Ingber, wish!) the prospect of a Galliano retrospective at the Met had never gotten as far as it did, but the thing is, it did, and once something's on the schedule, un-scheduling it is, well, cancellation. All of this is happening at a time when anti-antisemitism is more aligned than ever with conservatism in the United States, what with Trump administration flirtations with allowing Canadian Jews to join Afrikaners as refugees-of-choice. This despite most American Jews being Democrats. The truth of the matter may be artiste self-sabotages with longstanding pattern of nastiness but the meta-headline is Jews cancel genius. Beyond anything specific to do with Jews, the whole thing feels like a great big gift to anyone who's been dying to claim that the real cancel culture comes from the right. This is not accurate (the real cancel culture comes from all sides!), but attention spans are short enough not to extend to 2020-2021. The part of this story that haunts me is the way the exhibit's not-happening is being announced: not a cancellation but a postponement. Now is not the time, but some other moment will be. In one interpretation, there's some future moment when antisemitism calms down, perhaps vanishes entirely, at which point a Galliano retrospective wouldn't feel quite so insult-to-injury. In another, there's a future being alluded to where Jews and our desires are no longer holding anyone back from doing anything. Phoebe Maltz Bovy is The CJN's Opinion Editor, and author most recently of The Last Straight Woman. She can be reached at [email protected], @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. Subscribe to her podcast, The Jewish Angle, wherever you get your podcasts. *** What do you think? The CJN welcomes your feedback with a letter to the editor. If you wish to have your letter considered for publication, please submit using this form.