Early last month, Anna Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and powerful Metropolitan Museum 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 convince Menin that honouring 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 spokesperson, 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 Aug 31, 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 Wintour, 76.
She was the one who personally championed Galliano and prides herself on her unerring judgment and her astute assessment of art and fashion.
Read more: Planned Met Gala exhibit on fashion designer John Galliano is cancelled
Wintour’s effort to elevate Galliano by bestowing on him the Costume Institute’s highest honour – 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 spokesperson 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.
Elisha Wiesel, chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, said, “If praise for Hitler and references to the gas chamber do not disqualify someone, where is the line?”
Concerns continued to grow
At first, the museum’s leadership team seemed confident that the public would want to see the exhibition, despite Galliano’s past misdeeds.
Some 15 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 apologised for his remarks against 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 more than US$300mil (approximately RM1.2bil) for the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion wing, including a record US$42mil (RM170mil) in 2026.
Overall, Wintour has raised more than US$500mil (RM2bil) 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 carnivallike 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 Wintour and Galliano assured them Galliano’s bigoted behaviour 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.”
Galliano later denied through a spokesperson 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.
Read more: Fashion still embraces John Galliano, but the wider world isn’t so forgiving
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 Aug 28 The New York 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 8am, Aug 31, with a video conference of the entire board scheduled for 4pm.
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 am on Aug 31, 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 cancelled exhibition. The story did not detail the concerns about antisemitism, but it said the plan to honour 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 cancelled, but only “postponed”. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
