Anna Wintour calls antisemite John Galliano ‘courageous'
Updated: Sep 1
That impecablly dressed beach! She can kiss my designer ass!
I'm not reading another issue of Vogue Magazine and refuse to attend the Devil wears Prada II. Anne Hathaway and Streep are my shit list two.
Nobody f-cks with the tribe!
Anna Wintour calls antisemite John Galliano ‘courageous,’ offers him ‘full support’ after he’s forced to pull out of Met Gala
By Kate Sheehy, NY Post
Published Aug. 31, 2026
Defiant Vogue icon Anna Wintour on Monday issued a fawning statement supporting convicted Hitler-loving haute-couture creator John Galliano — calling him “very courageous’’ after he caved and called off an upcoming Met Gala exhibit about himself.
“John’s decision that the exhibition devoted to his work should not take place at this time is very courageous and a measure of the man he is,’’ said the global fashion diva and magazine legend — digging in her Manolo Blahnik heels to still back her embattled buddy amid intense outcry over his personal sins.
“I believe this is the right decision, and both he and the Museum have my full support,” Wintour said in her brief remarks posted on the Met Museum’s website.
Galliano, a onetime Dior wunderkind and A-list designer to the stars, horrified the world when he was caught in videos spewing vile anti-Jewish and -Asian hate around 2011.
Footage captured him hissing to a woman at a Paris cafe that she had an “ugly Jewish face” and telling a man with her, “f–king Asian bastard, I will kill you.”
The designer — who has dressed everyone from Princess Diana to Kim Kardashian — also drunkenly told a Jewish woman, “I love Hitler” while saying her family should have been “gassed” during the Holocaust.
His fall from fashion-world grace was swift — with him dropped by Dior and convicted in France of “public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity.’’ He was issued a fine.
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The fashion pariah claimed he was mentally unstable, went to rehab — and appeared to have eventually made amends with some leaders of the Jewish community.
He re-entered the designer world at least partly thanks to the help of the fashion world’s God — Wintour, Vogue’s powerful former longtime editor in chief whose alleged over-the-top antics were immortalized in the 2006 Meryl Streep flick “The Devil Wears Prada.’’
Wintour, who stepped down from her elite top role in 2025 but is still the outlet’s head of editorial content, helped Galliano continue to land work.
She “has been not just his ambassador but his fairy godmother for more than 30 years,” said Dana Thomas, who penned “Gods and Kings,” a biography bout Galliano and fellow iconoclast designer Alexander McQueen, to CNN.
John Galliano and Dame Anna Wintour attend The 64th Evening Standard Theatre Awards after party at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on November 18, 2018 in London, England.
“And much of what exists in his career would not have existed without her complete support, unquestioned support.”
But Wintour could not stop the avalanche of outcry when the Met’s planned tribute to Galliano in Manhattan surfaced several weeks ago.
Jewish leaders refused to accept that someone with his past would be feted, and Galliano finally bowed out himself Monday.
Even the NY Times jumped on her
A fashion disaster
By Sam Sifton, NY Times
Sept 1, 2026
For more than three decades, the editor and star maker Anna Wintour has presided over the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — and its accompanying Met Gala, a glittery, billionaire- and celebrity-studded fund-raising dinner that has become the fashion world’s equivalent of the Super Bowl. In fashion, few have had more power.
How durable is it? Her role in the decision to honor an established antisemite, the designer John Galliano, at the 2027 Met Gala brought that into doubt. Yesterday, Galliano pulled out of the exhibition planned to showcase his work. “I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” Galliano wrote in a statement. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.”
Why was he selected? Galliano was convicted of an antisemitic hate crime by a French court in 2011. He was said to have screamed “Merry Christmas” at a woman in an Italian spa in 2019 who was speaking Hebrew with her daughter. (Galliano’s spokesman denied that the incident happened.) The Times has quoted politicians, art-world heavies and Jewish leaders who were appalled by the pick.
“This is not a freedom of expression issue,” one New York assemblyman told my colleagues Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein. “This is a judgment issue, and I am baffled that anyone saw this as anything other than a terrible idea.”
Now the fallout could hurt Wintour’s place in the cultural firmament. “She’s outlasted and outmaneuvered every person, obstacle and trend that has come along over the course of her career,” Jacob told me yesterday. “But this is definitely one of the bigger missteps of her career.”
Who is John Galliano?
John Galliano working with a fashion model and assistants.
John Galliano during a 2005 fitting inside Christian Dior’s original wood-paneled Paris atelier. Derek Hudson/Getty Images
Many in the fashion world consider Galliano to be one of its most important contemporary designers. He’s 65, a child of Gibraltar who grew up in Britain and has lived in France for decades. He was the head designer at both Givenchy and Dior — a four-time British Designer of the Year. He ran Dior from 1996 until 2011, when he said “I love Hitler” at a bar and told some patrons that “your mothers, your forefathers” would all be “gassed.” That got him fired. After a period of rehabilitation — meeting with rabbis, apologizing a lot — Galliano returned to fashion in 2014 as the creative director of Maison Margiela.
Two moments in Galliano’s public life stick out to me. The first was a 2000 show he mounted for Dior, his “clochard” collection, which he said drew inspiration from the homeless population of Paris. There were clothes that resembled piles of old newspapers and accessories fashioned of found objects, like little pony bottles of whiskey. The show drew mass demonstrations and accusations of heartless cruelty. Ben Stiller appeared to lampoon the show the next year in his satirical film “Zoolander.”
The second was a photograph captured by a paparazzo in New York City in 2013, two years after Galliano’s hate-crime conviction: the designer dressed in what appeared to be a Hasidic costume, with a long, formal black overcoat and big black hat to match. His publicist denied accusations that he was mocking anyone, but it could have been a plot point in “Zoolander 2.” Creative genius isn’t a license to offend.
Who gets absolution?
Perhaps, in 2026, Galliano’s return should not have come as a surprise. Many Americans believe that cancel culture went too far, and lots of people banished by it have returned to public life — Kevin Hart and Mel Gibson among them. Martha Stewart went to prison and then picked right back up where she’d left off. Donald Trump was found legally liable for sexual abuse, kicked off Twitter and Facebook and denounced by countless Republicans. Now he lives in the White House again.
But Galliano’s case shows that, in some cases, redemption may have limits. Megyn Kelly remains successful, but it’s on her own channel, not network TV. James Franco has returned to Hollywood, but it’s on vertical video, and the reviews have not been good. As Jacob told me yesterday, it might have been acceptable to let Galliano design clothes for Margiela. But to shower him with adulation at what is arguably the most storied American museum would cross a line, particularly for wealthy Jewish patrons of the Met “who have no shortage of options for where to send their money, or bequeath their paintings,” Jacob said. That realization came to the Met slowly, and then all at once.
The guidelines for this sort of thing — for what behavior can be forgiven and what cannot — have always been fuzzy. They change based on the moment, the culture, the politics, the specifics. But every once in a while we get a case that suggests where the boundaries lie.
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