Preventing the famous fashion designer from returning to the glittering stage of fashion after many years also revealed the current and historical dilemmas in the West.
When John Galliano's name came to the agenda of the fashion world again, what was discussed was not his new selection. The "John Galliano: Horizons" exhibition, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) plans to organize in 2027 and will be dedicated to his career, created great excitement in the fashion world and soon became the focus of a serious reaction. The exhibition was canceled in a joint statement by Galliano and the Met on August 31.
Galliano's past explains why: After his antisemitic and racist remarks became public in Paris in 2011, he had to leave his job at Dior, undergo rehabilitation and was convicted as a hate crime in a French court. Years later, he returned to the fashion world and became the creative director of Maison Margiela in 2014. He worked here until 2024. So Galliano's story was not just a story of decline, but a long story of comeback.
That's exactly why the Met's exhibition meant more than an ordinary professional comeback. But allowing a person to work again is one thing, accepting him again is another!
Despite his past, it is quite another for an institution to honor him as part of its cultural heritage. The oath brings us to a very old question: When is a person considered forgiven?
CAN PEOPLE CHANGE?
Modern society is finding it increasingly difficult to answer this question. It is easy to say that a person should be held accountable for the wrong he has done in the past. We can also say that he should apologize, accept the consequences, and change if possible. What about then?
How will we know that it has changed? How much time is enough? Just because a person pays for what he did, does that mean he has to remain the same person for the rest of his life? Or is it that one of the most important characteristics of the being we call human is that it can change?
In the Christian tradition, the story of St. Paul is striking in this respect. The transformation of Saul, who was described as persecuting Christians, into Paul after his transformation on the road to Damascus and later becoming one of the most important figures of Christianity, constitutes one of the most powerful "fall and rebirth" narratives of Western culture. The idea is simple but the consequences are big:
“A person does not have to be limited to the worst thing he has ever done.”
St. Augustine's "Confessions", in which he describes his own past and transformation, has been seen as one of the strongest examples of a similar idea for centuries. Perhaps humanity has been struggling with the same question for a long time:
“Should we define a person by his past or by his possibility of transformation?”
This is exactly why I mention Christianity. Christianity, which has an extremely important place in the formation of Western thought, has strongly emphasized the idea that a person's past does not have to completely determine his future.
FORGIVE AND HONOR
There is not only an individual forgiveness phase regarding Galliano. You may believe that a person has changed. You can even allow him to work again, produce and be a part of society. But honoring him again is a different phase.
The Met's planned exhibition was also at a critical threshold. The purpose of the exhibition was not only to showcase Galliano's designs. It was an exceptional retrospective for a designer whose career spanned 40 years and whose creative legacy stretched from Givenchy and Dior to Maison Margiela. Had the exhibition been held, it would have been only the third retrospective the Costume Institute has dedicated to a living designer.
So the question is now “Can Galliano work?” It wasn't. It turned into a question: "Can Galliano be made a hero again?" Maybe that was the real reason for the reaction. Because societies' capacity to forgive and their capacity to heroize are obviously not the same thing.
There is a serious distance between giving a second life to a person and crowning him with all the achievements of his first life.
CHANGING POLITICAL ATMOSPHERE
Here, we should not ignore the broader atmosphere of the period in which the debate took place.
The antisemitic discourses of Galliano's past are coming to the fore again at a time when Israel's war in Gaza and the Palestinian issue have created intense political and social debates in the Western public in recent years.
There are also protests and boycott calls in the cultural world due to Israel's presence in arts and cultural events. For example, at the 2026 Venice Biennale, some pavilions were closed in protest of Israel's participation in the event.
We don't have enough data to say that this was the direct cause of the backlash against the cancellation of the Met exhibition. Objections to the exhibition clearly focus on Galliano's past antisemitic and racist remarks. However, it is not easy to completely exclude the possibility that the sensitivity created by the debates around antisemitism, Israel and Palestine in the Western public today may have affected the way such a debate is perceived.
Perhaps that is why Galliano's past is no longer seen as merely a tale of personal mistake and personal rehabilitation. It becomes part of a larger social memory.
TO FORGET THE PAST OR TO CHANGE PEOPLE?
Another contradiction emerges here. On the one hand, modern society wants to believe that people can change. This is where the meaning of concepts such as rehabilitation, reintegration and second chance come from.
On the other hand, he is also afraid of forgetting the past. He worries that saying “changed,” especially when it comes to public figures, makes past events invisible.
Maybe forgiving is more difficult than "acting like nothing happened":
The cancellation of Galliano's Met exhibition does not resolve this question. Maybe he shouldn't solve it anyway. Because there is no single right decision to make here. Who decides if a person has changed? Is his apology enough? Is forgiveness of the victim necessary? Is a second chance possible without society's consent? Or is time the most important evidence of human change?
Humanity has been looking for definitive answers to these questions for centuries and still hasn't found them.
