Anna Wintour Conferred With Jewish Leaders About Gala Honoree John Galliano

Yesterday the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vogue magazine announced that designer John Galliano, who has sometimes been as personally controversial as he is professionally influential, will be the 2027 honoree of the celebrated Met Gala next spring.

Apparently it was not a decision that Vogue’s global editorial director and a Met trustee Anna Wintour and other Gala organizers took lightly. Galliano has been, to put it mildly, a polarizing figure in the fashion world since video of him making antisemitic comments surfaced in 2011.

Now, in an exclusive report, The New York Times reveals that Wintour, Galliano and Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Met’s Costume Institute, have been meeting over the course of the past year with “influential rabbis and Jewish leaders” in New York City “to get their thoughts on the potential issues with next year’s planned fashion extravaganza — a show dedicated to Galliano’s work — and perhaps their blessing for it.”

Widely considered a leading and influential figure in contemporary fashion, Galliano was the head designer for Dior from 1996 to 2011. His tenure came to an end when video surfaced of a drunken Galliano berating other customers at a Paris bar with vile antisemitic insults. A Paris court subsequently convicted him of a hate crime and ordered him to pay fines and court fees. The designer later apologized, saying he suffered from severe alcoholism and drug addiction and has no memory of the incident.

The Times article, written by the paper’s chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, includes comments from the rabbis and Jewish leaders who are among those that have met with Gala reps at least several times in recent months. “The fear clearly was the show could be met with a lot of resistance — not just skepticism, but a feeling of it’s wrong,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in North America. Jacobs said he had been impressed by Galliano during the meetings. “The word I come back to is ‘sincerity,’” Jacobs said. “He was open. He looked right at us and spoke in a clear way, not as if he had memorized talking points.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, provided The Times with an emailed comment, writing, “We believe John Galliano has genuinely worked through the issues that led to his antisemitic outburst years ago in Paris, and we have long since accepted his apology. His efforts to repair the damage his words caused and to learn from that incident should be applauded.”

The Met’s 2027 Costume Institute exhibition in association with the Gala will be titled John Galliano: Horizons, and is expected to celebrate the British designer’s influence on fashion while also confronting the 2011 controversy.

With the exhibition opening in spring 2027, Galliano will become just the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition at The Met, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017.

Bolton, the curator, said in a statement yesterday, “Horizons approaches fashion as a form of cartography, mapping not territories but affinities, tensions and transformations. It traces how images become ideas, ideas become material and material becomes emotion. Yet a horizon reveals not only what lies before us but also where we stand.”