Anna Wintour Defends 2027 Met Gala Theme Honoring John Galliano Despite Designer’s Past Hate Crime Convictions: ‘His Career Isn’t Defined By A Moment

Anna Wintour Defends 2027 Met Gala Theme Honoring John Galliano Despite Designer’s Past Hate Crime Convictions: ‘His Career Isn’t Defined By A Moment

The next #MetGala theme has been revealed.

The Costume Institute has announced its spring 2027 exhibition, “John Galliano: Horizons,” making the designer only the third living honoree in the show’s history, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. Galliano, 65, built his reputation at Givenchy, Dior, and later Maison Margiela, but his career was upended in 2011 after a string of antisemitic and racist outbursts, most notoriously a filmed incident in which he expressed admiration for Hitler at a Paris restaurant.
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Those outbursts led to two separate hate crime convictions in Paris, tied to a February 2011 verbal a$$ault on a man at a café near his apartment and a similar incident targeting a woman there months earlier. Galliano was fined roughly $8,500 and later attributed the behavior to addiction, telling the court he was seeking treatment. In a 2024 documentary revisiting the episodes, he described his conduct bluntly: “It was a disgusting thing, foul thing that I did.”
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The Met is framing the exhibit as an unflinching look at Galliano’s full legacy rather than a way to cover up his past. Vogue’s #AnnaWintour, a longtime champion of Galliano, defended the choice, saying, “There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale.” She added, “He’s a great designer and his career isn’t defined by a moment—something that he will live with for the rest of his life. The exhibition won’t shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”