About John Galliano and the Sound of Money
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced at the end of July that its spring Costume Institute exhibit would honor the work of John Galliano, I was a little shocked but not all that surprised. A little shocked because I didn't realize the Met was in the business of honoring folks convicted of hate crimes. And not all that surprised because if the last decade has taught me anything, it's that there are no lasting consequences for terrible behavior. A convicted felon is still the most powerful person on the planet, after all. So why would the Met, and Anna Wintour, let a little anti-semitism get in the way of a good time?
If you're not familiar with Galliano, he's a British fashion designer who was the longtime creative director at Dior. In 2011, a French court convicted him of a hate crime following a series of anti-semitic and anti-Asian outbursts; ever the trendsetter, Galliano was publicly declaring his love of Hitler a decade before Kanye West gave it a whirl. He was fired from Dior, but Wintour stuck by him; she helped him get a plum job at Maison Margiela, and this summer decided that it was high time that the Met throw a party for her friend. And thus it was decreed that next year's Met Gala (which opens the exhibit) would fete a man who once told some Jewish bar patrons that their ancestors would have been gassed in the camps. The date of the Met Gala? May 3, which in 2027 is also—drum roll— Holocaust Remembrance Day.
When the backlash came, the exhibit's organizers claimed that they'd gotten the green light from some Jewish folks, so that it was actually all totally okay. Not so fast, said some other Jews, including New York's City Council speaker and a couple of intensely wealthy Met patrons who had decided that perhaps the museum was no longer the place to will their priceless works of art.
When the Met announced last Friday that it would cancel the Galliano exhibit, my thoughts went to The Devil Wears Prada 2. The movie's plot revolves around the efforts of its protagonists to save their beloved Runway magazine from a terrible billionaire. They eventually do this by finding a better billionaire. The movie's implicit message, that things will work out fine if you can find the right rich person, struck me as cynical and horribly sad—and sadder still because, as the Galliano fiasco just illustrated, it's also not wrong. Had the right rich people not gotten angry at the Met, I don't doubt that the exhibit would have gone merrily forward.
In Prada 2, Wintour's stand-in, the legendary Runway editor Miranda Priestly, faces backlash for publishing a puff piece about a clothing brand that uses sweatshop labor. We're told she's out of touch, a charge that could certainly be leveled at the woman who inspired her. Wintour—who herself once published a puff piece about the wife of the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad—has of late gotten cozy with the tech oligarchs who have done more than their fair share to disembowel the news media (to say nothing of democracy, but that's a post above my pay grade). When she invited the Jeff Bezoses to chair this year's Met Gala, her decision was rightly met with protests and rumblings that perhaps it was time to dispense with both the gala and the Wintour.
It takes nothing away from Wintour's incredible achievements and legacy to say that between the Bezos and Galliano affairs perhaps it's time she directed her talents elsewhere. But her apparent coziness with the likes of Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg suggests she's well aware of this. In the end, even Anna Wintour needs the right rich person, too.
What I'm consuming this week:
Reading: Angela Fluornoy's The Wilderness.
Watching: Eric Rohmer's 1983 Pauline at the Beach. No one does wry, slightly problematic social comedies like the French.
Listening: Remembering Tim Curry on Fresh Air.
