British designer John Galliano, who declared “I love Hitler” in 2010, prompting his firing from Dior and a criminal conviction in France, is to be the focus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2027 Costume Institute exhibition and Met Gala, the museum said late last month.
The exhibition, titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” will examine the designer’s four-decade career, making him just the third living designer to receive a solo retrospective at the Met’s Costume Institute.
The museum does not plan to shy away from Galliano’s history of antisemitic remarks. It stated that the exhibition will “address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception,” while considering “how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.”
The show will also probe the ways that “Galliano has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work,” stated Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute curator who is organizing the exhibition.
Split into three sections, the show’s first part will “open with a conceptual chronology connecting Galliano’s career and collections to broader historical and cultural events” and “directly address the rupture caused by his antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct in 2010 and 2011.”
“It will also consider his subsequent treatment for substance addiction and his later public acknowledgment of his actions,” the museum stated.
The Met has held several meetings over the past year with some of the “most influential” rabbis and Jewish leaders as it planned the exhibition, the New York Times reported.
Dior fired Galliano in 2011 after a video surfaced in which he declared, “I love Hitler,” and told people at a Paris bar that their ancestors “would all be f***ing gassed” in the Holocaust.
He was also filmed insulting a woman’s “ugly Jewish face” and telling the man with her, “f***ing Asian bastard, I will kill you.”
He was convicted in France of making public insults based on religion, race or ethnicity and received suspended fines totaling about $8,000.
Galliano has since apologized and attributed the remarks to a period of severe alcoholism and drug addiction. In a 2023 documentary, he said that he had little recollection of the incidents captured on video.
Rabbi Barry Marcus, a South African rabbi, said in the documentary that Galliano subsequently studied antisemitism and the Holocaust with him and met with a concentration-camp survivor.
Galliano returned to fashion as creative director of Maison Margiela in 2014.
The Anti-Defamation League defended his rehabilitation in 2013 and stated that he had “worked arduously in changing his worldview and dedicated a significant amount of time to researching, reading and learning about the evils of antisemitism and bigotry.”
“There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” stated Anna Wintour, global editorial director of Vogue and longtime chair of the Met Gala.
“The exhibition won’t shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past,” she stated. “It’s part of what has shaped him.”
