The moment Anna Wintour’s judgment stopped being unquestionable

For nearly four decades, Anna Wintour’s greatest talent may not have been deciding what was fashionable, but making her judgment appear beyond question. Designers, advertisers, celebrities, billionaires and even one of the world’s leading museums learned that a no from Wintour could be only the start of a negotiation. With John Galliano, that stopped being true.

On July 31, New York’s Metropolitan Museum announced John Galliano: Horizons, the Costume Institute’s major exhibition for spring 2027. The show was to cover four decades of Galliano’s work, from his graduation collection at Central Saint Martins through Givenchy, Dior and Maison Margiela. It would have made him only the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition from the museum. Exactly one month later, the Met said the exhibition would not go ahead.

Galliano was convicted in France in 2011 for antisemitic and racist insults after several incidents at a Paris bar. A video in which he said “I love Hitler” led to his dismissal from Dior. He later apologized, underwent treatment for addiction and met with Jewish leaders. In 2014, he returned to the top of the fashion industry as creative director of Maison Margiela. Wintour supported him through much of that process, appeared in the 2023 documentary High & Low: John Galliano and said, after the exhibition was announced, that no one deserved a retrospective on that scale more than he did. His career, she said, should not be defined by a single moment.

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No one deserved a retrospective of that scale more than he did.

The exhibition would have crowned a rehabilitation that Wintour had backed for years. It also exposed how far she still believed she could carry a personal opinion into institutional consensus. This time, however, the objections were known in advance. During the previous year, Wintour, Galliano and Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s head, held meetings with rabbis and Jewish leaders. The New York Times reported that Wintour spoke for half an hour in early August with Julie Menin, the president of New York’s City Council and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, in an effort to persuade her.

Jacob Bernstein, Vanessa Friedman and Dana Rubinstein reported that possible ways to soften the backlash were discussed, including changing the date or focus of the gala and opening the exhibition earlier to Jewish community leaders. The effort did not simply ignore the problem. Those involved believed they could solve it. They could not. Political criticism was joined by concerns from donors and collectors, while an alleged 2019 incident involving Galliano also resurfaced. The attempt to honor him made clear that, even if fashion can bring visitors into museums, the two institutions do not operate by the same rules.

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His career could not be defined by a single moment.