Met Gala icons wore the designs of someone with an antisemitic — but apologetic — past
Kim Kardashian and John Galliano, who designed her dress. Photo by Cindy Ord/MG24/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
By PJ Grisar May 7, 2024
As pro-Palestinian protesters flocked near the site of the Met Gala Monday night, inside the museum a different sort of protest was underway.
While the Met recently made the decision to place an indefinite pause on a retrospective of the designer John Galliano, meant to be this year’s Gala exhibition, co-chairs Zendaya, Bad Bunny, Vogue co-presenter Gwendoline Christie, Kim Kardashian and many others were spotted defiantly wearing his work on the red carpet.
The Cut, Fashionista and The Washington Post are hailing him as the night’s big winner. We love an underdog, I guess. But wait a second, why was Galliano’s exhibition paused?
Oh, yeah, the lurid public display of antisemitism.
In 2011, Galliano was fired from Dior for going on a drunken antisemitic tirade at a Paris bistro where, speaking to a group of Jewish diners, he said, “I love Hitler,” and “people like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f—ing gassed.”
Now, if I were Kim Kardashian, trying my best to dodge the mounting evidence that my ex-husband was obsessed with Hitler for our entire relationship, I maybe wouldn’t choose to wear that teeny corset made by a dude who also professed his love of the Führer. Certainly I wouldn’t do it on Yom HaShoah.
But, to be fair to Galliano, he has seemed to make amends and is now vying for a full rehabilitation.
The new documentary High & Low addresses the designer’s struggle with addiction and his return to the fold of haute couture. A London rabbi, working with Galliano, said that “to brand him as an antisemite would be an injustice.” The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt is satisfied with the steps Galliano has taken toward teshuva. His predecessor, Abe Foxman, who counseled Galliano directly, told the Forward that the designer asked what more he could do — did he have to get circumcised? (It’s unclear if Galliano went under the knife, though some accused him as dressing a bit like a Haredi Jew in 2013.)
Unlike Mel Gibson, who’d like you to believe he just had one bad night at a traffic stop, it does appear that Galliano’s outburst may have been an isolated incident born out of ignorance, drugs and alcohol and his own pain. (If you want avowed fashion Nazis, Coco Chanel and Hugo Boss are right there.)
As he told Vanity Fair in 2013, Galliano came to realize that at that moment, he was “so f—ing angry and discontent with myself that I just said the most spiteful thing I could.”
So maybe Galliano, with the support of Anna Wintour herself, has earned a second act. Maybe even more than some of the unrepentant celebrities he dressed.
To pick just one example, Adrien Brody, the Jewish actor who wore a Galliano tux, has still never apologized for forcing a kiss on Halle Berry at the Oscars or for wearing rasta dreadlocks to introduce Sean Paul as a musical guest.
That last debacle reportedly got him banned from Saturday Night Live. If there is justice in the cruel world of fashion, the blond-hair-dark-roots-look he was rocking Monday will get him disinvited from future Galas.
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