Galliano Galore
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute announces that the long-disgraced British designer is the subject of its next annual blockbuster exhibition and gala theme.
Also in this issue:
LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault is peeved
To quote former ace Hollywood reporter Nikki Finke: “TOLDJA!”
Last night, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that next year’s Costume Institute exhibition will be John Galliano: Horizons, “the first major museum show to examine the full breadth of his creative output.”
You know, like my book Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano does.
As you all are devoted readers of The Style Files, you know I have reported several times that this was coming:
In September 2023, when High & Low—John Galliano, a documentary directed by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and produced in association with Condé Nast Entertainment, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. As I reported back then, Anna Wintour had been shopping that doc for years, and I knew of three directors who, after speaking with her about it, had turned it down. Something I’ve never mentioned: Macdonald came to me early in the development of that film, said he’d read the book, was interested in optioning it, and asked me to consult on the film. We had several discussions, then radio silence. I always wondered who put the kibosh on my involvement, because clearly someone did. At the time of the premiere, I wrote in The Style Files that I saw the doc as the kickoff of a well-planned rehabilitation, or uncancelling, campaign of John Galliano, so he could eventually be the subject of a Met retrospective and gala, likely scheduled for the following spring.
Then, in May 2024, when New York magazine confirmed that Galliano was indeed supposed to be the subject of Costume Institute’s marquee exhibition and gala, but the project was postponed because of the Israel—Gaza war, and the Pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia University’s campus thirty blocks away. As you may recall, Galliano was fired from Christian Dior in 2011 for a drunken, anti-Semitic outburst at a Paris cafe. More about that below.
And last March, when Zara announced it had hired Galliano to “re-author” its archival designs. The first items will arrive in Zara stores next month. I saw the partnership as the final installment in Galliano’s rehabilitation campaign, and predicted that the Met show announcement would be coming soon.
And again in April, when I was told at a conference in Barcelona that Anna Wintour had been spotted on the Zara campus last fall, before the partnership announcement. My source said he’d heard Zara would be underwriting the gala. That subject was not addressed in the Met’s press release.
What the press release did say is that the show will include “sketches, toiles, research books, and archival materials.” That’s interesting, given most of Galliano’s archives from the 1980s and early 1990s—his first decade in business—do not exist anymore.
As I write in the book:
In 1986, when Galliano’s first and extremely patient backer Johann Brun was forced to shut down the company because it was losing so much money, he sold off “the patterns, the samples, the unused bolts of fabrics, sewing machines—because they were the company’s assets and would be needed to pay off creditors in liquidation.” Galliano’s fourth collection, “Forgotten Innocents,” never went into production.
In November 1991, his second backer, Peder Bertelsen, also gave up, and stopped financing Galliano: “As with Brun, the relationship ended badly, with Galliano’s archives chucked into bins and assets sold off in liquidation.”
Some former employees, like Gail Downey, who hand-knit Galliano’s knitwear pieces for his first collections in the 1980s, and Amanda Harlech, his devoted original muse/stylist who he brutally abandoned when he took the Dior job, kept original clothing and items from those years. But you know who has the most ephemera, such as press kits, look books, videos, slides, invitations, and newspaper and magazine clippings?
Me.
I spent almost five years working on Gods and Kings, went to see nearly every person who ever worked for Galliano, from his degree show in 1984 to his hiring at Dior in 1996, and came home with all sorts of promotional materials, including sketches. And with the help of my research assistant Chantel Tattoli, I found just about every article ever written about him—most of the 1980s ones were not online—thereby building a John Galliano research archive. I also kept all of the Galliano invitations that I received from 1994 onwards. (I did the same for McQueen.) There are cases and cases of the stuff in my basement.
We’ll see if Andrew Bolton gives me a call. He hasn’t yet.
Most interestingly, the Met release says the show “will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception. In doing so, the exhibition will consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.”
To remind those who know and inform those who don’t, this is what went down.