To John.
This morning, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and John Galliano announced that John Galliano: Horizons, the Costume Institute exhibition scheduled for May 2027, will no longer proceed as planned. To say I am gutted by the news would be an understatement. It would have been the first major museum exhibition to examine the full breadth of John’s work, drawing from what The Met itself describes as the largest collection of its kind in the world. Garments, sketches, archives, everything from his 1984 Central Saint Martins graduation collection through Givenchy, Dior and Margiela.
More importantly, this was not supposed to be a shrine.
The exhibition had been conceived in three movements. The first, Bearings, was explicitly designed to confront Galliano’s antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct in 2010 and 2011, his dismissal from Dior, his conviction in France, his addiction, treatment, and subsequent public acknowledgment of what he had done. The Met said the gallery would ask how aesthetic achievement, ethical accountability, and institutional recognition could coexist.
That is precisely why its cancellation is underwhelming.
Let us dispose of the easiest argument first. What was said was vile. There is no intelligent argument in which I pretend otherwise. He lost Dior. He was convicted. He entered treatment. He apologized. He later met with Jewish leaders and engaged publicly with what he had done; the Anti-Defamation League has said it accepts his apology and efforts at repair, while other Jewish thinkers and community figures remain unconvinced. Both facts deserve to exist in this same paragraph.
But I am suspicious of a culture that speaks passionately about accountability while remaining strangely embarrassed by the possibility that accountability might eventually produce change.
“Cancel culture” is an inelegant phrase because it is frequently deployed by people who simply dislike consequences. Yet there is a point at which consequence loses any relationship to time, conduct, repair, or transformation. Human beings are walking flesh attached to an overthinking brain and an archive of things we wish we had not said, done, desired, or become. That does not make all failures equivalent. It does make the possibility of change rather essential to the entire meaning of being human.
The objection to the exhibition is not frivolous. A Costume Institute retrospective is canonization, accompanied by one of the most glamorous spectacles on Earth. Critics were right to ask what it means to give that platform to John; the reported plan to hold the 2027 Met Gala on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) was, definitely, an avoidable complication. Some Jewish donors and leaders argued that redemption does not entitle somebody to a public honor of this kind.
But if the gala had become the moral problem, then change the gala.
Change the date. Change the framing. Invite dissent into the galleries. Publish it in the catalogues. Put testimony beside the clothes. Make discomfort part of the experience.
Do the difficult thing.
Instead, we now arrive at the part that will make some people uncomfortable. And that is that John is one of the greatest designers of all time. Not because I say so, but because his work demonstrates it.
Take the Princess Lucretia period of 1994. Romanov Russia, the lost mythology of Anastasia, Anna Karenina, the Duke of Edinburgh, Madeleine Vionnet. In less capable hands, these references could easily become creative indigestion. But John was able to materialize it all into a silhouette. The Met has pointed specifically to his use of Vionnet’s bias-cut language, a method he had been developing since the late 80s and which helped propel the slip dress into the vocabulary of the 90s.
Look at the ivory crêpe gown from his 1995 Dolores collection. The dress is bias-cut and seamless, interrupted by embroidered chiffon carnations inserted into its surface. He used the flower as a symbol of undying love in a collection inspired by Dolores del Río. That is as romantic as it is technically vicious.
That is the point people miss when they reduce John to theatre. That is why describing him merely as a showman has always felt insufficient.
Alexander McQueen was a showman. At his best, spectacle became psychologically challenging: Voss required the audience to stare into its own reflection before the glass asylum revealed itself; Widows of Culloden ended with Kate Moss materializing like an ectoplasm in the midst of it all. But the trick worked because Lee’s tailoring and dressmaking could withstand the theatrical weight placed upon them.
Galliano belongs to that category.
Tom Ford belongs too, for his peculiar precision about desire, image and product. Three completely different intelligences. McQueen could make fashion feel traumatic. Ford can make it feel erotic. Whilst John can make it feel grand.
In 1994, he was effectively broke, sleeping on a friend’s floor, before staging his fall-winter collection, with help from muse Amanda Harlech and hatmaker Stephen Jones. The result fused Japanese kimono references with 1940s tailoring, which helped revive his career. Romantic philosophy could tell you the lesson is perseverance. I think the lesson is editing. Scarcity forced his fantasy to become precise.
At Dior, he acquired the opposite problem: abundance.
Money. Ateliers. Archives. A name already carved in history.
And this is where weaker designers often become a lucid memory of the past.
For Dior’s Fall 2005 couture, created around the centenary of Christian Dior’s birth, tweed suits were remade in transparent organza, their houndstooth suggested in white beadwork. A fitter’s pincushion became jewelry. A padded bra cup was displaced from the bust to the hip, turning the architecture responsible for Dior’s curves into visible ornament. The Met describes the gesture explicitly as construction rather than deconstruction. That distinction is everything.
John did not destroy Dior to prove he was innovative or challenging.
He opened Dior up, inspected its skeleton, dissected its flesh, and then put it back together with the seams showing.
This is what serious creative direction looks like.
That is, and will always be rare.
And then came Margiela.
That appointment could have been potentially disastrous. Martin’s conceptual restraint and John’s baroque instinct appear, superficially, almost allergic to one another. John himself has spoken about having to loosen his obsession with polish and rediscover techniques through Margiela’s vocabulary—cutting tweed on the bias precisely because its tendency to unravel created a different emotional surface.
By 2024, that tension matured into something—in simple words—breathtaking.
For the Artisanal collection under Pont Alexandre III, John began with Brassaï’s photographs of Paris after dusk and spent roughly a year translating that atmosphere into extreme corsetry, padded hips, sheer lace, and different morphologies. The collection framed dressing itself as a construction of the self.
But if one looks closer…
John developed a technique he called retrograding, allowing line, texture, and technique to intensify across a garment until flatness appeared to become three-dimensional. Dresses were built only after the body had first been re-engineered through corsetry. Gwendoline Christie returned repeatedly for fittings and training. Pat McGrath was asked to create skin that looked like porcelain; the effect required repeated layers, transparency and light until something digital was achieved physically. John discovered the venue of the show while jogging; at first he was told no, no again, and—naturally—wanted it more.
Saying that is “putting on a good show” would be calling the ocean damp.
Garment, body, face, light, sound, room, and character. Every discipline understood its place inside the sentence.
Almost nobody can do that well because almost nobody possesses all the necessary faculties simultaneously. Research is not enough. Technique is not enough. Taste is not enough. Money certainly is not enough. One needs the ability to imagine an entire world and then enough technical ability to make it exist.
That is why John Galliano matters.
It is also why the cancellation of Horizons feels intellectually impoverishing.
There is incoherence in where fashion has landed. John can complete a decade at Margiela to enormous critical acclaim. His work can become one of the defining fashion moments of its time. He can return to the front row. He can enter a two-year creative partnership with Zara, whose first project arrives this September. Yet a museum exhibition explicitly designed to examine both the work and the disgrace becomes untenable.
So, dumbing it down: we can monetize the designer. We can wear him. We can borrow from him. But apparently, studying him is off-limits.
I refuse to make this an arithmetic argument about a minority ruining what the majority wanted… once again.
Pain is real. So is history.
The whole purpose of Horizons was supposed to be putting those realities in the same room.
The Met framed the exhibit around the difficult coexistence of John’s achievements, accountability, and recognition. That was the correct position. A museum does not need to absolve its subject. It only needs to study it.
I consume John’s work religiously. The silhouettes, the references, the mistakes, the excess of it all. I do not need to pretend objectivity where none exists: his work has shaped how I understand what fashion can do and make one feel. But devotion without scrutiny is only fandom.
So, I do not need John to be innocent in order to recognize the work. I do not need what happened in 2011 erased. In fact, I would have objected to an exhibition that attempted to erase it. I wanted quite the opposite.
I wanted to walk into The Met and see the carnation dress beside the research that produced it. I wanted to understand how a Dior archive becomes transparent organza. I wanted the Artisanal toiles, the fittings, the sketches. But I wanted the rupture there too—the footage, the dismissal, the addiction, the apologies, and, with no doubt, the uncomfortable question of what we do when somebody capable of making great art proves himself capable of great ugliness…
That is a conversation worth having.
We won’t be wiser because the room will now be given to some other exhibit that’s easier to digest.
John is not owed forgiveness.
John’s work is owed examination.
Those two statements are not contradictory.
That was the exhibition.
And that is why losing it is such a shame.
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL
