How the
Galliano Show at the Met Fell Apart
Anna
Wintour put her full power and prestige behind a designer convicted of an
antisemitic hate crime. Behind the scenes, influential New Yorkers revolted.
By Jacob
BernsteinVanessa Friedman and Dana Rubinstein
Sept. 2,
2026
Updated
3:05 p.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/style/john-galliano-met-exhibition-cancel-anna-wintour.html
Early
last month, Anna Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and powerful
Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee, reached out to Julie Menin, the daughter of
a Holocaust survivor and the first Jewish speaker of the New York City Council.
Over a
30-minute video call, Wintour tried to persuade Menin that honoring John
Galliano, the fashion designer convicted of an antisemitic hate crime, with a
solo exhibition in the Met’s Costume Institute was a good idea.
Galliano
is a creative genius, Wintour said, according to Menin. And he is contrite
about his previous rants against Jews — which included an exclamation of “I
love Hitler!” and a taunting of patrons at a bar that their forefathers would
all be “gassed.”
During
the call, Wintour, who rules over the fashion world and the Met Gala with
almost unquestioned authority, offered to have Galliano meet privately with
Menin. She also, according to Wintour’s spokeswoman, discussed possible ways to
mollify critics of the show, such as moving the date of the gala, changing its
focus and opening the exhibition early for Jewish leaders.
Menin
left the call feeling brushed off. Wintour had continued to exude confidence
that the exhibition would be a success.
On
Monday, that confidence collapsed, as the Met abruptly announced that the show
was off.
The
implosion of the most important event on the museum’s calendar, with its
star-studded extravaganza that draws luminaries from the worlds of
entertainment, art and industry and generates tens of millions of dollars each
year, was a striking stumble for the 76-year-old Wintour, who has personally
championed Galliano and prides herself on her unerring judgment and her astute
assessment of art and fashion.
Wintour’s
effort to elevate Galliano by bestowing on him the Costume Institute’s highest
honor — only two living fashion designers have previously been celebrated with
solo shows — touched off a tense drama that played out among New York’s
powerful and prominent as they scattered to their vacations during a typically
quiet stretch of August.
By
pushing ahead with the plan, Wintour and other Met leaders appeared to misread
some essential realities of the moment: The fashion world’s forgiving and
commercially driven values do not often reflect broader public sentiment. The
Met leaders, many of them non-Jewish, seemed out of touch with the raw feelings
of the city’s Jewish residents, who had witnessed searing incidents of
antisemitism over the summer. And even the extraordinary ability of Wintour to
sweep away scandal, criticism and controversies through sheer will and
decisiveness has its limits.
“It was a
perfect storm of unnecessary insensitivity,” said Rabbi David Ingber, senior
director of Jewish life and senior director of the Bronfman Center at the 92nd
Street Y.
In a
statement, a museum spokeswoman said of the Galliano show, “Like every Met
exhibition, it proceeded through the museum’s established processes of
curatorial development and institutional review, including with certain board
groups.
But the
blunder has touched off many hard questions about Wintour’s, and the Met’s,
judgment.
Said
Elisha Wiesel, chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation: “If praise for Hitler
and references to the gas chamber do not disqualify someone, where is the
line?”
Growing
Concerns
At first,
the museum’s leadership team seemed confident that the public would want to see
the exhibition, despite Galliano’s past misdeeds. Fifteen years had gone by
since he was found guilty by a French court of the hate crime.
After his
conviction, Galliano went into rehab and apologized for his remarks against
both Jews and Asians. He met with Jewish leaders and studied the history of
Judaism under rabbis. Wintour supported him when he was persona non grata, and
helped him become the creative director of a prestigious luxury brand, Maison
Margiela, where his tenure was widely applauded until his departure in 2024.
As far as
the fashion world was concerned, Galliano was back, reputation restored, and
the Met had good reason to believe the show celebrating the 65-year-old
designer would be a hit: Five of the 10 most-visited exhibitions in modern
museum history have been Costume Institute shows, and over the years, Wintour
has transformed the Met Gala from just another stuffy benefit into a spectacle
akin to the Super Bowl or the Oscars. Since 1999, when she took over the event,
it has brought in over $300 million for the Costume Institute, the Met’s
fashion wing, including a record $42 million in 2026. Overall, Wintour has
raised more than $500 million for the museum.
But even
in late July, after The New York Times broke the news of the planned Galliano
exhibition, there were early murmurs of opposition. Some of them emanated from
members of the nearly 100-person Met board, who had long tolerated Wintour’s
imperious manner, from her habit of wearing sunglasses at board meetings to her
neglecting to invite many of them to the gala. They had stayed quiet in the
past, even as they chafed at the increasingly carnival-like atmosphere she
created, from the arrival of the Kardashians at the gala to ever more
outrageous clothes on display.
Some
prominent Jews, meanwhile, were unsettled by the news, but worried that if they
spoke out, they would play into stereotypes.
“People
didn’t want to seem like they were complaining,” said Alice Tisch, whose
extended family has donated millions to the Met. “One of the trustees I talked
to said, ‘I think they’ll take it out more on the Jews.’”
As a
result, many people who disagreed with the plan hoped to work quietly toward a
resolution, especially as both Wintour and Galliano assured them Galliano’s
bigoted behavior was firmly in the past.
But then
doubts about that claim surfaced.
Early in
August, a Facebook post written by fashion publicist Lauren London began to
ricochet around industry circles about a more recent event allegedly involving
Galliano. London described an encounter she said she had with the designer in
2019 at the luxury Henri Chenot spa, an alcohol-free wellness retreat in Italy.
She wrote that her friend had been speaking in Hebrew on her cellphone, when
Galliano overheard her and began screaming, “Merry Christmas!”
“When my
friend asked him if he had a problem with Hebrew he promptly and very
unapologetically responded that he did,” London wrote in the post. “She then
told him that she had a lot of his clothes and when she got back to her home in
Israel she would dispose of them. He told her to please do.”
Still,
even as the Facebook post gained traction, allies of Wintour were unmoved.
“I have
no opinion about Facebook posts,” said Andrew Solomon, a member of the Met’s
executive committee who spoke to The Times after the post surfaced last month.
“I think they’re frequently made up, or exaggerated, or incoherent, and I have
no idea what the truth is or is not behind that.”
Galliano
later denied through a spokesman that the incident at the spa took place. But
London’s friend who made the call, and her daughter, backed up her account.
Around
the same time London wrote her post, Arne Glimcher, an art world titan, sent an
email to David Breslin, a Met curator, and Max Hollein, who as the Met’s
director had given final approval to the Galliano exhibition.
“I don’t
think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to
come,” Glimcher wrote. He added that he and his wife were “seriously
reconsidering other works that have been earmarked from our collection to the
Met in our wills.”
It is not
clear how Hollein responded, but his ties to Wintour were deep. And, as far as
he understood, the museum had taken steps to head off just this kind of
negative reaction. In the spring, Wintour and Andrew Bolton, the curator in
charge of the Costume Institute, had arranged private meetings between Galliano
and Jewish leaders. Most of those leaders came away saying they found him
remorseful for his past actions. They were also assured that the exhibition
would deal frankly with his hateful statements.
The
Jewish leaders made their support public when the show was announced. But the
full board of the Met was never consulted, leaving many feeling that there had
not been sufficient deliberation about the appropriateness of the museum’s
choice.
“I
thought it was insane,” Tisch said.
Climate
of Fear
On Aug.
14, a man entered Central Synagogue in Manhattan and attacked a congregant and
a security guard during Shabbat services, rattling the city. The violence hit
especially hard for many of the museum’s benefactors, who are congregants
there. And it occurred as hate crime against Jews in New York continued to
rise, representing the majority of all such crimes in the city.
Those
already jolted by the Met’s decision to honor Galliano began to worry that the
exhibit would serve to normalize antisemitism inside one of New York’s most
hallowed spaces.
No longer
was the fashion discussion occurring in a vacuum, but in an increasingly tense
New York. As the days ticked by, city officials including Menin and City
Comptroller Mark Levine, were growing fed up with the Met leaders’ failure to
respond to their concerns. On Aug. 26, Menin wrote a letter of protest, on
official city stationery.
“Our
cultural institutions, particularly those that receive funding from the City of
New York, have a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry
consequences,” Menin wrote to Wintour, Hollein and Bolton.
Two days
later, Tisch fired off a message of her own to Hollein. In it, she described
the plan for the exhibit as a “whitewash” of a “known” antisemite.
The
exhibition, she went on to say, “bespeaks a failure of governance as it seems
you are unduly influenced and directed by a corporate donor and commercial
enterprise, and mining it all for financial gain.”
When
Tisch didn’t hear back, she forwarded her email to people she knew on the
board: Samantha Boardman, Daniel Brodsky, Dasha Zhukova Niarchos, Blair Effron
— “anyone whose email address I happened to have,” she recalled.
(Board
members interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity,
because the museum’s leadership has been reprimanding trustees for sharing
their concerns with the news media.)
On
Friday, The Times published an article describing the intensifying backlash.
Social media lit up with more criticism. A sense of crisis took hold inside the
Met, even as the show’s key players were scattered around the globe — Hollein
in his native Austria, Bolton in Lake Como, Galliano in his Paris studio.
The Met
called an executive committee meeting for 8 a.m. on Monday, with a video
conference of the entire board scheduled for 4 p.m.
But
before they even met, Hollein, Bolton and Wintour agreed to a plan with
Galliano: He would say publicly that he had asked the museum to suspend plans
for the show.
At 8:45
a.m. Monday, he put out a statement on social media: “After much reflection and
discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it
is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” he wrote.
“I do not
want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or
distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he continued. “I
also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful
for some.”
Almost
100,000 comments poured in, many praising Galliano and calling the outcome
unfair, others denouncing the Met and Wintour for abandoning the show.
Back in
New York, recriminations began. The afternoon meeting of the full Met board
took place as scheduled over Zoom. It began with board leadership scolding
members for talking to the news media, according to participants. When other
members asked why they had not been consulted early on, they were told that the
full board could not be included on every decision.
Hollein
spoke of Galliano’s talent and the Met’s decision-making process. Wintour, who
was also present on the video call, remained silent.
But that
day, Vogue published an article about the canceled exhibition. The story did
not detail the concerns about antisemitism, but it said the plan to honor
Galliano had been met with “mixed reactions.”
Quoted in
the article, Wintour praised Galliano as “the premiere couturier of his
generation.” She also described the show not as canceled, but only “postponed.”
Jacob
Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section of The Times.
Vanessa
Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times
since 2014.
Dana
Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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