When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it was dedicating its 2027 costume exhibition to designer John Galliano, vintage dealer Johnny Valencia figured it would be a red carpet for the ages. Celebrities would show up in full Marie Antoinette drag, or squeeze into tightly bound corsets showcasing hourglass figures, recreating the pageantry of Galliano’s over-the-top runway shows.
“There was a lot of excitement around this theme,” said Valencia, whose customers include the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna. “There had not been this much excitement since camp” – the institution’s fete of outrageous and questionable taste in 2019.
Valencia runs Pechuga Vintage, a Los Angeles showroom where he sources rare archival fashion pieces from houses such as Chanel, Vivienne Westwood and Versace. With the Galliano theme set, he got to work pulling dresses for the rarefied and beautiful few who would be handpicked to attend the corresponding gala by Vogue doyenne and Met Gala co-chair Anna Wintour.
“I located a gorgeous 2004 gown by Galliano,” Valencia said. (That year the designer staged a gold-dripped, Egyptian-themed runway show.) “I had people on the line in Paris to purchase [Dior] couture. There was definitely pressure to find the best of the best.”
The pressure evaporated this week, after the Met announced the exhibition honoring Galliano “will not proceed as planned”. This came after a wave of criticism from Met patrons, New York politicians and prominent Jewish leaders who objected to a public institution celebrating a man best-known outside fashion circles for antisemetic and racist remarks.
In 2010, Galliano was caught on camera saying, “I love Hitler” at a Parisian cafe and telling patrons that their ancestors would have been “gassed”. Months later, he called someone a “fucking Asian bastard” at the same cafe. A swift downfall followed. Galliano lost his creative director post at Dior, where he had worked since 1996, entered rehab and was found guilty in a Paris court of a hate crime. (Galliano, who has been sober for 15 years, said he was living with a “triple addiction” to alcohol, sleeping pills and Valium during his bigoted outburst.)
But he would not be fashion’s persona non grata for long. Wintour, a longtime champion of the British designer’s work, brokered his comeback. First came a temporary residency with Oscar de la Renta. Then Vanity Fair published a 2013 profile of the embattled designer, who posed for Annie Leibovitz’s camera in front of a dramatic waterfall. (Headline: “Galliano in the Wilderness”.) The piece centered its subject’s “efforts to atone”, including meeting with rabbis and the Anti Defamation League to learn more about Jewish history and the Holocaust. It posited that Galliano’s addiction came at a time of personal crisis that was partly due to the demands of his career and the recent death of his longtime friend and business partner.
Wintour spoke passionately about her friend in the piece. “We need the dreamers,” she said. “We need those designers who create a magic moment, a world that changes the way you look at clothes.”
And, for the most part, fashion forgave Galliano, under the pretense of second chances. He ended up leading Maison Margiela from 2014 to 2024, staging a triumphantly flamboyant runway show during his final year that was near universally praised for its body-morphing corsetry. This year, Zara announced a collaboration with the designerto be released later this month. But no event would be as visible as “fashion’s biggest night”: the Met Gala. However, despite Wintour’s attempts to get ahead of any scandal – which included inviting Jewish leaders to meet with Galliano, with a rabbi telling the New York Times the designer seemed “sincere” in his remorse – the rest of the world was not so charitable.
Wintour is known for her steely resolve and fearsome reputation. Some fashion insiders are shocked by this rare, public and messy instance when she did not get her way.
Lauren Sherman writes Line Sheet, a Puck newsletter about fashion’s power players, and is one of the best-sourced style reporters in the US. But even she “didn’t see” the Met’s Galliano reversal coming. “I think that’s a reflection of being too sheltered by the fashion industry,” she said. “I didn’t speak to one person who ever thought this could happen. I would say [Wintour] was really adamant that [Galliano] be honored while he was alive and working.”
Dana Thomas, a Paris-based reporter who wrote God and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, noted a decades-long “rehabilitation campaign” spearheaded by Wintour. “There was a master plan,” Thomas said. “This was Project Galliano. Wintour was easing him back to the mainstream, but in the end, everyone was not OK with that.”
Part of the plan was a documentary about Galliano. According to Thomas, Wintour spoke with three potential directors who all turned it down because they felt that her presence and demands loomed largely over the project. “She personally shopped that documentary for years,” Thomas said.
Eventually director Kevin Macdonald took the gig, releasing High & Low – John Galliano, a nuanced look at the designer’s fall from grace, in 2023. The Scottish director is not a fashion person; he is perhaps best known for One Day in September, an Academy Award-winning film about the Munich Olympics massacre. He said he had full creative control over the film, in which Galliano referred to his hate crime as “a disgusting thing, foul thing I did”. (Galliano also reports having no memory of the incident.)
“Wintour was incredibly helpful and wanted the documentary to be made,” Macdonald said. “She expended a lot of political capital on Galliano. She didn’t need to and has nothing to gain from it. I think she genuinely thinks he’s a great talent. There’s no other reason I can think of why she’d want to spend as much capital on him.”
This is the man who created the Dior saddle bag, one of the most popular accessories of all time, and one of the few handbags to have its own Wikipedia page. Galliano’s runway shoes – especially those that came before his outburst – are beloved by professional and armchair critics alike, referenced as the height of fashion-as-art. He designed the newspaper print dress worn by Carrie Bradshaw in a pivotal Sex and the City scene; this piece came from a controversial 2000 collection inspired by homeless people, quickly dubbed “hobo chic”. (The collection inspired a scene in the fashion world parody Zoolander.) Galliano’s signature bias cut dresses cling to women’s bodies and ooze a timeless Hollywood glamour. His vintage pieces remain in demand for a new generation of (well-heeled) shoppers, regularly going for thousands of dollars on eBay or in high-end vintage shops – and will probably continue to do so, Met Gala or not.
“I would call the Galliano girl a sexy nerd,” said Valencia, the vintage dealer. “She knows her shit and the history around why a piece was made. And she’ll pay the price for it.”
Galliano is far from the only scandal-plagued fashion designer. The industry rewards those with inflated egos, bad tempers and questionable ethics, and most people who cherish fashion are used to keeping a selective memory when it comes to the past misdeeds of a favorite designer. In 2020 several people accused Alexander Wang of sexual assault and drugging drinks; his clothes are still stocked at Nordstrom, Bloomingdales and other big retailers. (Wang denied the allegations.) Stefano Gabbana, one half of Dolce & Gabbana, prompted public outrage in 2018 when he appeared to make anti-Asian statements on Instagram after the brand released a video where a model ate pizza with chopsticks that viewers deemed insensitive. Sarah Jessica Parker, Naomi Osaka, Madonna and Jennifer Lopez have all worn the brand since then.
Insiders like Valencia consider Galliano’s past words abhorrent and make no excuses for his behavior. But they also fret over what they see as cancel culture run amok. “I just want to ask how many times are we going to reprimand a person and how many times are we going to punish someone?” Valencia said. “[He made] strides in his own recovery, mental health [and] a very public apology.”
Critics, however, publicly decried the Met’s choice. In a letter sent to Wintour and other members of the Met’s board last week, Julie Menin, the first Jewish speaker of the New York city council, called Galliano’s antisemetic and racist outbursts “deeply troubling”, and argued that cultural institutions which receive public funding “have a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry consequences”. She also referred to the account of Lauren London, a publicist who came forward this summer to allege that in 2019, Galliano yelled “Merry Christmas!” at her friend while she spoke on the phone in Hebrew. Galliano denies this account, which London first shared on Instagram.
If the Galliano Met Gala had gone ahead, Sherman said his work would have seen a boom in interest. “Next summer he would have been everywhere because people have had way more exposure to Galliano and Dior pieces,” she said. “I’m sure [that not happening] means that future sales could be muffled.”
It seems Zara still plans to release its Galliano collaboration, for which the designer has reimagined his past runway looks for the fast fashion retailer. It’s Galliano for the masses, though his storybook clothes have never been made with real life in mind.
“I know people who have seen the collection,” Sherman said. “They say it’s pretty unique. It’s not super commercial.” Does the Met dustup threaten any interest? Sherman thinks not. “If anything, more people know the name Galliano than they did last week.”
Representatives for the Met, Condé Nast and Zara did not respond to requests for comment.
For now, the Met Gala remains without a theme. Wintour has made clear that the fabled “first Monday in May” goes on. Still, there have been calls to cancel it outright, the most prominent one coming from Pulitzer prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan in a New York Times opinion column. That’s not so easy to do: this year’s Met Gala, with the theme “costume art”, raised $42m for the Costume Institute.
In the week since the Galliano theme was nixed, a new favorite parlor game among the glitterati (or wannabes) is dreaming up alternate ideas. Social media users have suggested a glitter-soaked Dolly Parton tribute, though that seems farfetched. “My recommendation is that they focus on sports,” Sherman said, pointing to the 2028 summer Olympics in Los Angeles. “That’s not going to offend anyone.”
More likely the 2028 theme, already in the planning stages but not yet publicly revealed, will be pushed up a year, Sherman said.
Thomas, the fashion writer, posted a callout to her Instagram followers for suggestions. “I got Armani, who recently died,” she said. “But they would never do that because [Wintour] doesn’t like him.” (Giorgio Armani once claimed that Wintour said “the Armani era is over”.) Other options from followers: “Christian Lacroix, Issey Miyake, Oscar de la Renta. First lady fashion.”
