“I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.”
That’s what John Galliano, who was then the head of the luxury fashion house Dior, spat to a nearby table at a café in Paris in December 2010. A few months later, he admonished the Jewish curator Gerladine Bloch at the same café for her “dirty Jewish face,” adding: “You should be dead,” a favorite refrain, apparently.
For these incidents he was charged with “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race, or ethnicity” in a French court and ordered to pay court costs of €16,500. His outbursts, the first of which was caught on camera, briefly stunted his career, though Galliano made his comeback in 2014 when he took the helm of Maison Margiela. The designer, who has done the obligatory apology tour and met with rabbis yadda yadda yadda, later claimed that he was in the throes of addiction during his rants and told Vanity Fair that he didn’t even remember uttering the bile. “My assistant told me about the video,” he said. “When I saw it, I threw up.”
All this was ancient, ugly fashion history until Anna Wintour decided that the appropriate subject for next year’s Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and the starry gala to kick the whole thing off, would be her longtime friend: John Galliano. Only two other designers, Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo, have been awarded this honor during their lifetime. No doubt, given the new 11,500 square feet of Condé M. Nast Galleries that Wintour’s spent decades fundraising for, Galliano’s Met moment was sure to be a blowout.
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