The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a spring Costume Institute exhibition honouring John Galliano in late July. It killed the show on August 31st, one month to the day later. Tyler Foggatt’s Critic’s Notebook piece in The New Yorker asks what that month actually settled — and finds that the fight was never about whether Galliano deserves forgiveness.

Her correction is blunt: “Galliano wasn’t cancelled; he was convicted.” A French court found him guilty of a hate crime in September 2011, after three antisemitic incidents at the same Paris café. He was fired from Dior after roughly fifteen years.

  • On video, published by the Sun, he told patrons: “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be fucking gassed”
  • He called curator Geraldine Bloch “a fucking ugly Jewish bitch” and threatened her friend: “Fucking Asian bastard, I will kill you”
  • During one roughly forty-five-minute rant he used the word “Jewish” about thirty times
  • His defense was a “triple addiction” to alcohol, Valium and sleeping pills; he said he was “not a bigot but someone who needs help”

The opposition came from the city’s politicians and donors — Council speaker Julie Menin, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, who wrote to the Met; assemblyman Micah Lasher; Brad Lander; the Mamdani administration, which called his antisemitic language “vile”; and Arne Glimcher of Pace Gallery, who threatened to cut the museum out of his will. Jewish institutional opinion was split rather than uniform: the ADL’s Abraham Foxman had accepted Galliano’s repentance years earlier, while Rabbi David Ingber described the position the Met created exactly — “Either we are blamed for being overly sensitive and not allowing him to be honored or we are complicit.”

Almost nobody argued Galliano should be denied forgiveness. Menin said she believes “in repentance and second chances” but that a museum honor goes beyond “mere forgiveness.” And Galliano is, professionally, fine: Maison Margiela, Kim Kardashian at the 2024 Met Gala, a Zara deal, a return brokered years ago by Anna Wintour — who then spent at least three years pushing the Met to honour him. That is Foggatt’s puzzle. Letting someone earn a living is one question; canonizing him in a slot only two living designers have ever held is another. She compares it to giving Mel Gibson a special Oscar rather than merely letting him work.

Nobody should take the ending as reassurance about institutions generally — the same mechanism Foggatt praises here has spent years failing to rein in worse ideas at much higher levels. But it is worth naming what happened: an executive and a curator overreached, and within weeks they were overruled by a council speaker, a few donors, a rabbi and a mayor’s office. The Met’s own press release had promised the show would consider “how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.” A gala that raises tens of millions of dollars was never a place that conversation could happen — which is why Robin Givhan’s proposal to keep the exhibition and cancel the party was, as Foggatt says, both obviously right and completely unrealistic.