The Met Gala? It was more like Met Galliano
Caught making anti-Semitic rants, the designer John Galliano’s career seemed over. But now, thanks to Anna Wintour, he’s back in fashion.
Whether they choose to wear a “naked dress” or vast crinoline that requires assistance from several security guards, the most talked-about guests at Anna Wintour’s Met Gala are usually its red carpet A-listers. This year, however, the name on everyone’s lips belonged to someone who neither posed for the photographers nor chatted on the live stream. Who was barely visible at the event, in fact, despite having once been one of the brightest – and most bravura – stars in the fashion industry’s firmament.
Yet when a designer dresses Kim Kardashian for her annual viral moment on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, it’s a sign theirs is in the ascendant. This year that honour went to John Galliano, the 63-year-old former Dior designer who lost his job in 2011 when footage emerged of his drunken anti-Semitic rants outside a brasserie in Paris. Now the creative director of Maison Margiela, Galliano also supplied outfits for the gala’s celebrity hosts, the Challengers actress and Gen Z darling Zendaya and the rapper Bad Bunny, on Monday night. And the singer Ariana Grande changed into one of his couture catwalk looks to perform on stage inside. Given that Wintour not only controls the guest list for this dollars 75,000-a-head event but is said to have the last word when pairing A-listers with the brands they wear, her verdict seems clear: it is time to forgive and forget. Galliano is back.
In addition, with the American Vogue editor’s endorsement he may be on manoeuvres. Zendaya appeared on the red carpet not once but twice in a Galliano design. Her second look was a homage to high Victorian mourning dress, with cathedral train, sourced from a 1996 couture collection during his tenure at Givenchy. That august label – once purveyor of Audrey Hepburn’s LBDs and Jackie Kennedy’s ballgowns – is without a creative director after the departure of Matthew Williams in January. The industry is poised for an announcement any moment, in time for the house’s spring 2025 catwalk show in September.
Nor is Galliano down for his usual Maison Margiela slot on the Paris couture schedule next month. The collection he presented in January for that label’s “artisanale” line, full of wasp waists and inspired by the photographer George Brassai, was hailed as a virtuoso return to the museum-grade costumes of his theatrical heyday, and exhibited to the press in gallery-worthy vitrines in the French capital. Could it have been a swansong to mark the closing of one chapter and a new start elsewhere?
“It isn’t often that you meet a great designer who really changes the way women dress,” Wintour told the film-maker Kevin Macdonald in High & Low, his documentary on Galliano’s controversy and subsequent cancellation, which was released in March. “John is one of them, so we had to help him.” At Dior Galliano presided over some of the biggest catwalk extravaganzas in fashion history, filling the Parisian runways with fairytale princesses and legendary femmes fatales, then taking his curtain calls dressed variously as an astronaut, pirate, even Napoleon Bonaparte.
After the furore a clutch of celebrity friends, including Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, ensured he checked into rehab, but few thought Galliano could work on fashion’s front line again.
There were rumours too that this year’s exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Awakening Fashion, for which the gala acts as an opening night, was slated to be a retrospective of Galliano’s work but the idea was shelved in favour of exploring the Costume Institute’s archives.
Wintour was instrumental in helping Galliano into the post at Givenchy in 1995, and again in finding him the role at Margiela in 2014. When he took up that job many on the front row were scandalised at his return, given that he had been caught on camera claiming to “love Hitler” and calling other diners “a f***ing ugly Jewish bitch” and “Asian bastard”. Yet the former showman appeared penitent and followed in the footsteps of the label’s diffident Belgian founder, who never showed his face in public. Since then Galliano has been something of a phantom presence in fashion: often referenced, still revered, but rarely seen.
That seems to be changing. After January’s couture high, the singer Miley Cyrus wore Galliano’s Margiela at the Grammys in February. The younger Kardashian sister Kendall Jenner wore one of his gowns to the Vanity Fair Oscars party in March.
When Macdonald’s film came out that month against the backdrop of intensifying troubles in the Middle East and a related rise in reports of antisemitism, the designer came under renewed scrutiny – and so did his supporters.
“I will never make excuses for him,” Charlize Theron, a face of Dior whose father struggled with addiction, says in the film. “It was despicable behaviour – but this illness is so beyond what a lot of people can wrap their heads around.”
When I spoke to Macdonald this year he told me that he believed Galliano’s talent was the reason the industry had rallied round. “It always puzzled me that Anna Wintour decided to expend political capital on John. [Why else] would she risk herself and her company for this man who has been so vilified?
“John wasn’t popular with a lot of people,” Macdonald said, “but I was surprised that most of the people I approached wanted to take part. That says something about the sort of loyalty he instils.”
Whether LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, who owns Givenchy and remembers giving Galliano the job (not to mention the boot) last time, will want to take the risk again remains to be seen. Nevertheless, Monday’s red carpet spotlit some of the other British design talents that Arnault’s luxury conglomerate has harnessed. The singer Raye arrived in a silver Fendi dress created by the Londoner Kim Jones, who is in charge of the Italian brand as well as Dior’s menswear.
Likewise, Wintour chose to wear a coat and dress by the Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson at Loewe, also within the LVMH stable and sponsor of the Costume Institute’s new exhibition. Others dressed in Anderson’s designs included The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri and the actress Taylor Russell, who is perhaps most famous for being Harry Styles’s girlfriend. Anderson’s name has been mentioned in the same breath as the Givenchy job.
Jenner arrived in yet another gown from the Givenchy archive, this time from Alexander McQueen’s autumn 1999 couture collection at the label and featuring his signature low and buttock-bearing “bumster” cut. Meanwhile, at the label that still bears his name, the designer Sean McGirr referenced one of its most famous shows, 2006’s Widows of Culloden, by dressing the singer Lana Del Rey in an update of one of its veiled, antlered looks.
Fashion’s 20-year trend cycle means the late Nineties and early Noughties are once again in its sights, but its fascination with the men who were once London fashion’s most famous enfants terribles – one approaching retirement age, the other dead since 2010 – looks set to run and run.
The Times