Wintour Consulted Rabbis Year Over Galliano Met Gala Pick
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- John Galliano has been named the 2027 Met Gala honoree by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vogue, becoming only the third living designer to receive a solo Costume Institute exhibition after Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017.
- Anna Wintour, curator Andrew Bolton, and Galliano spent the past year meeting with influential rabbis and Jewish leaders in New York to gauge concerns about honoring a designer convicted of a Paris hate crime in 2011 after video surfaced of him drunkenly hurling antisemitic insults at bar patrons.
- Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in North America, told The Times he was impressed by Galliano's 'sincerity,' saying the designer 'looked right at us and spoke in a clear way, not as if he had memorized talking points.'
- Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in an emailed comment that Galliano 'has genuinely worked through the issues that led to his antisemitic outburst' and that his efforts to repair the damage 'should be applauded.'
- The accompanying spring 2027 exhibition, titled John Galliano: Horizons, is designed to celebrate his fashion influence while confronting the 2011 controversy head-on, per Bolton's statement describing the show as mapping 'affinities, tensions and transformations.'
- Galliano was head designer at Dior from 1996 to 2011; a Paris court convicted him of a hate crime and ordered him to pay fines and court fees, and he later attributed the incident to severe alcoholism and drug addiction.
Why it matters: The Met and Vogue spent a full year quietly cultivating buy-in from the Union for Reform Judaism and the ADL before going public — an extraordinary pre-emptive effort that underscores how polarizing Galliano's honor remains and how much institutional Jewish approval mattered to making the spring 2027 'Horizons' exhibition viable.
