Update: This is happening right now, the news just broke a few minutes ago – John Galliano is pulling out of next year’s Met Gala. Below is the original story about the backlash to Galliano-as-Met-Gala-theme.

About a month ago, Anna Wintour announced the 2027 Met Gala theme: John Galliano, the controversial and still-living designer who transformed Dior and Maison Margiela. This is only the third time Wintour has chosen a still-living designer for the honor, which is its own separate controversy. But the bigger controversy is that Galliano was arrested for antisemitic hate speech in France in 2011. Galliano left Dior and went to rehab soon after his arrest, and he’s spent the past fifteen years trying to make amends and show respect to the Jewish community. I have to admit something: when Galliano was announced as the theme, I thought that people had mostly forgiven him, but I was absolutely wrong. Many celebrities have worn Galliano’s designs since 2011, but that doesn’t mean that all is forgiven, nor does it mean that people believe that Galliano is deserving of this special honor while he’s still alive. As it turns out, since the theme announcement, all of Anna Wintour’s carefully-laid plans have blown up in her face. Sponsors and patrons are dropping out, Jewish leaders are speaking out and now Wintour is thinking about doing something huge: moving the date of the gala.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is facing a growing backlash because of its plan to honor John Galliano, the accomplished British fashion designer who was convicted of a hate crime by a French court in 2011 for his antisemitic outbursts.

Galliano, who transformed Dior into a global powerhouse before his disgrace, is scheduled to be the subject of a nine-month exhibition sponsored by the Met’s Costume Institute. The show is to kick off with the Met Gala, the annual springtime benefit and red carpet extravaganza overseen by Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director and a Met trustee.

Amid the public criticism, Met trustees and board members have been scrambling to do damage control. For starters, they are mulling whether to move the date of the next Met Gala from its usual slot, the first Monday in May, to the week after. In 2027, Yom HaShoah, also known as Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, will fall on the scheduled party date.

In recent days, opposition to the museum’s plan to honor Galliano has grown among Jewish leaders in New York and beyond. Donors have contacted Met executives and threatened to rescind gifts to the museum if the exhibition moves forward as planned. They have reached out to Wintour, Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute, and Max Hollein, the museum’s director.

Julie Menin, the speaker of the City Council, and one of the most senior Jewish officials in city government, called the museum’s decision to highlight Galliano’s career “a serious mistake” in a letter she sent on Thursday to Hollein, Bolton and Wintour. “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 in the letter, which was shared with The New York Times by a museum official. “Words matter, and whom we choose to elevate is a direct statement of our values and what we are willing to tolerate.”

Menin then urged the museum to reconsider its decision to sponsor the exhibition. Reached by phone, she declined to comment. Menin was not the only high-profile figure to confront the museum. Arne Glimcher, the art world titan, recently sent an email critical of the plan to Hollein and David Breslin, a Met curator. “I don’t think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to come,” Glimcher wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Times. He added that he and his wife “are seriously reconsidering other works that have been earmarked from our collection to the Met in our wills.”

Jill Kargman, a longtime member of Friends of the Costume Institute, a patron group, said she was stepping down from her role because of the show. 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.”

Elisha Wiesel, son of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel and the leader of his father’s charitable foundation, said on Thursday that the decision to honor Galliano “seems like a pretty bad idea.”

“If someone had screamed the worst racial epithet you can imagine, said, ‘You’re a horrible Black person and your ancestors would have been hung from a tree,’ you could not imagine them being honored by a prominent cultural institution.” It would not matter, he added, if the person had apologized for such remarks. Wiesel seemed skeptical that Galliano’s history of antisemitic remarks would be meaningfully addressed in the planned exhibition. He predicted that it would amount to some wall text in the middle of a show devoted to “black-tie archival couture and a carefully managed encounter with antisemitism.”

[From The NY Times]

I think this is very fair: “The question is not whether they can do this, but whether they should have.” This is on Anna Wintour and her team, all of whom thought they were managing the situation by carefully selecting some Jewish leaders to meet with Galliano and give him and the gala their blessing. But the community is not a monolith and different people are going to feel differently about the Galliano-theme selection. Extremely valid points are being made, especially by Elisha Wiesel. I wonder what Wintour will choose: moving back the gala, or dumping her friend Galliano as the theme/honoree. The latter should be given more consideration, but we’ll see. It’s also worth noting that all of this backlash is coming just weeks after Galliano was named for the exhibition and theme – no one waited until the last minute, and honestly, Wintour has plenty of time to course-correct and change her mind.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.