How Anna Wintour’s Quest to Salvage John Galliano’s Legacy Was Thwarted

Anna Wintour was on a yearslong quest to reclaim John Galliano’s legacy.

The British designer’s career fell apart in 2011, after antisemitic and racist comments cost him top jobs in fashion and led to a criminal conviction in France. Wintour had worked to rehabilitate his image, and finally the moment had arrived: a multimillion-dollar party in his honor and a legacy-enshrining exhibit, both held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Then Julie Menin stepped in.

Menin, the New York City Council speaker, whose mother and grandmother were Holocaust survivors, told the most influential woman in fashion that she was making a “grave mistake.”

“In a time of rising antisemitism, this absolutely sends the wrong message and sets a very dangerous precedent,” Menin recalled telling Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and the chair of the Met Gala, during a Zoom call in mid-August.

Though Menin said Wintour tried to assure her that the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, had plans to contextualize the designer’s antisemitic comments, Menin wasn’t persuaded.

“I don’t think antisemitic remarks need to be contextualized,” Menin said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Of course, people can repent and have a second chance. But they should not be lauded.” She said that the City Council had allocated more than $3 million to the museum next year but that if the exhibit went forward, “certainly this would be a factor in upcoming decisions.”

Menin wrote a letter to the museum, reiterating her concerns. Galliano might be an influential artist, one worthy of critical exploration in an exhibit and perhaps even forgiveness, she wrote, but to celebrate him would cross a line.

Wintour had offered to introduce Menin to Galliano, and the speaker agreed to a mid-September meeting, a spokeswoman for Wintour said. Meanwhile, Menin took her grievances public, posting her letter to X.

A few days later, the exhibit, planned for May 2027, was off .

Menin’s outcry helped thrust into the public eye the private effort to get the Met to revise its plans to fete Galliano at a time when antisemitism is rising globally. Politicians condemned the celebratory exhibit and attendant gala as tasteless and insensitive. Donors threatened to pull funds and works earmarked for the museum.

“I couldn’t hold my head up if I didn’t say anything,” said Arne Glimcher, founder of Pace Gallery, who, with his wife, Milly, has donated more than 50 works to the museum including pieces by Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko and Jean Dubuffet. He said he had written a letter to the museum last week saying that he and his wife were thinking about changing their will: Artworks they intended to bequeath to the museum might no longer be donated after their deaths unless the Galliano show was canceled.

Glimcher, whose late brother-in-law Morris Dach was a survivor of Auschwitz, said he had spent the weekend trying to get others to write similar letters, but said everyone was “afraid to give their names. But what is there to be afraid of?”

People close to the museum were reluctant to speak about the exhibit, its organizers or Galliano himself. Some said high-profile donors were worried about attaching their names to the controversy amid a climate where stereotypes about influence are weaponized against Jews.

The cancellation has reanimated a longstanding debate about creative genius: Can the artist be separated from the art?

Galliano, who is revered in the fashion world for his creative direction at Dior and Maison Margiela, has long been one of the industry’s most polarizing figures. In 2011, the designer lost his job at Dior after a British tabloid published a video of him drunkenly proclaiming “I love Hitler” and telling cafe patrons their “forefathers would all be f—ing gassed.” Later that year, he was found guilty of a hate crime over additional incidents where he made racist and antisemitic remarks. He has said that he was drunk and struggling with substance abuse at the time, and has since gone to rehab, gotten sober and sought counsel from Jewish leaders.

“We give politicians second chances all the time, why won’t we give that to a creative person?” Abe Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy group that works to fight antisemitism, said in 2013 in an interview about Galliano. “Forgiveness is at the heart of Judaism.”

But critics say there is a difference between forgiving Galliano’s words and throwing a glamorous party in his honor—which also would fall at the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah in Hebrew.

“We open the door to teshuva ,” said David Wolpe, a rabbi in Los Angeles, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “But we don’t necessarily carry them on our shoulders if they have repeatedly said some truly awful things.” Wolpe published a punishing Substack essay in which he called the Met’s Galliano exhibit a “moral travesty.” He previously made headlines for stepping down from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group and publicly criticizing the university in 2023.

On Monday, the Met announced that the exhibit and gala would no longer proceed as planned. “I understand that meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition, institutional recognition or a single public gesture,” Galliano said in a statement. “It is a continuing responsibility, demonstrated through listening, learning and one’s conduct over time.”

In her own statement, Wintour said: “John’s decision to ask the Museum to postpone the exhibition devoted to his work is very courageous and a measure of the man he is. I believe this is the right decision, and both he and the museum have my full support.”

In an emergency board meeting held after the cancellation was announced, museum CEO Max Hollein and board co-chair Tony James said that the way the exhibit came together was a mistake, according to a person on the call.

Some knew about the Galliano exhibit, but the full board, which has around 100 members, hadn’t been notified before it was announced publicly at the end of July, the person on the call said. A spokeswoman for the museum said the Met planned to inform the entire board at a later date and that the museum announced the exhibit early because the New York Times reported it.

The planned exhibit, titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” was to span the designer’s four decades in fashion. It would also “directly address the rupture caused by his antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct,” according to the Met’s exhibit announcement.

“There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” Wintour told Vogue in July.

Leading up to the announcement of the exhibit, Wintour, Galliano and Bolton, the Costume Institute curator, met with some leaders of the Jewish community, including Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in North America. Jacobs told the Journal in early August that he lent his support to the exhibit.

A spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League said the organization was consulted only after the exhibit was already announced. In a statement to the Journal in early August, CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt said the ADL had accepted Galliano’s apology but was concerned about the exhibit’s timing. “It’s on the Met and partners to meet the moment, not with token gestures around one exhibit,” he said.

After her meetings with Wintour and the Met, Menin said, she met with multiple insiders at the museum and encouraged them to speak up.

Glimcher said the museum would now stay in his and his wife’s will. “The moral standing an institution takes defines that institution,” he said.

As the postmortems begin, some are questioning how the exhibit’s planning came so far to begin with.

While it is widely seen as Wintour’s baby, multiple leaders at the museum, which is home to the largest collection of Galliano’s work, had publicly championed the exhibit.

“John Galliano has exerted a profound influence on fashion over the past four decades,” Hollein, the Met CEO, said in his statement announcing it.

In his own statement, Bolton, who published a book about Galliano’s tenure at Dior, said the exhibit would consider “both how Galliano has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work.”

Wintour and Bolton planned to theme an exhibition around Galliano in 2024 before the idea was shot down internally, people familiar with the plans said.

“A celebration of John’s work, because it is so important and it has been so brilliant, I think is really deserved,” said Simon Ungless, an old friend of Galliano’s and longtime printmaker for his professional rival Alexander McQueen. “But I think people should read the room. It’s not the time for it. And whether it will ever be the time, who knows?”

Write to Chavie Lieber at Chavie.Lieber@WSJ.com , Anna Silman at anna.silman@wsj.com and Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com