The Met and John Galliano call off Horizons

STYLE · MUSEUMS

Some careers can be exhibited. Others are still being argued over. The retrospective that was to be John Galliano’s museum consecration will not take place: on 31 August, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that “John Galliano: Horizons”, the Costume Institute’s spring 2027 exhibition and the theme of next May’s Met Gala, had been cancelled, barely a month after it was first unveiled.

Max Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, said that the museum and the designer had reached the decision together, after careful discussion.

A retrospective contested from the start

The show met resistance as soon as it was announced. Galliano was dismissed from Dior in 2011 after antisemitic remarks in a Paris café, and later that year was convicted by a French court of public insults on the grounds of religion and race. He has apologised repeatedly in the years since, and the Costume Institute had promised that the exhibition would address the conduct that changed his career and his public standing.

It was not enough. The response was swift, above all from New York’s Jewish community, at a time of rising antisemitic hate crime in the city. Donors contacted museum executives and threatened to withdraw their support if the exhibition went ahead as planned.

A joint retreat

Faced with the pressure, museum and designer stepped back together. In a statement on Instagram, Galliano wrote that, with great sadness, he had concluded it was “best for the exhibition not to take place at this time”. He said he did not want the debate around him to put the Met in a difficult position or to distract from the work of the Costume Institute, acknowledged that a show honouring his work would be painful for some, and said he remains deeply sorry for his past words.

Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Costume Institute, supported the decision, as did Anna Wintour. There is precedent: in 2000 the museum abandoned a planned Chanel retrospective.

What the spring loses

Horizons would have been the first major museum exhibition devoted to Galliano, tracing a career from his 1984 graduation collection at Central Saint Martins through his own label, Givenchy, Dior and Maison Margiela. The Met had described him as one of the most inventive and influential designers of the past four decades.

The museum has said that a new spring exhibition and the theme of the 2027 Met Gala will be announced at a later date. Trustees have also weighed moving the gala from the first Monday in May, which in 2027 coincides with Yom HaShoah. As of mid-October, no replacement had been named.

Galliano built a career on the idea that clothes carry history. In the end, it was his own history that no museum could hang on a mannequin. The galleries reserved for spring will hold something else, and the old question of whether a body of work can be separated from the hand that made it remains, for now, unanswered.

GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.