For almost forty years, Anna Wintour’s most extraordinary talent may not have been deciding what was fashionable, but making her judgment seem unquestionable. Designers, advertisers, celebrities, billionaires, and even one of the world’s great museums learned that a no in front of her could be just the beginning of a negotiation. With John Galliano, for the first time, it stopped being so.
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On July 31, the Metropolitan Museum of New York announced John Galliano: Horizons, the major spring 2027 exhibition of the Costume Institute. It was going to cover four decades of work, from his graduation collection at Central Saint Martins to Givenchy, Dior, and Maison Margiela, and make him only the third living designer to whom the museum dedicated a solo show. Exactly one month later, the Met announced that the exhibition would not go forward. Between one date and the other lies more than just a controversy about Galliano: there lies a public defeat of the most powerful editor of all time.
Galliano was convicted in France in 2011 for antisemitic and racist insults following several incidents in a Paris bar. A video in which he said “I love Hitler” precipitated his dismissal from Dior. Then came the apologies, treatment for his addictions, meetings with Jewish leaders, and, in 2014, his return to the forefront as creative director of Maison Margiela. Wintour was by his side throughout almost the entire process. She supported his return to the industry, participated in the documentary High & Low: John Galliano (2023), and when the Met announced the exhibition, she declared that no one deserved a retrospective of that scale more. His career, she said, could not be defined by a single moment.
The show culminated (would have culminated) a rehabilitation that the British editor had been endorsing for years and demonstrated how far her ability to turn a personal opinion into institutional consensus still reached. The problem was that this time she knew the objections in advance. During the previous year, she, Galliano, and Andrew Bolton, head of the Costume Institute, had held meetings with rabbis and Jewish leaders. According to The New York Times, in early August, Wintour spoke for half an hour with Julie Menin, president of the New York City Council and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, trying to convince her.
The attempt to honor Galliano suddenly reminded that, although fashion brings visitors to museums, they have never been the same
According to what Jacob Bernstein, Vanessa Friedman, and Dana Rubinstein have reconstructed, even formulas were discussed to soften the rejection: changing the date or focus of the gala and opening the exhibition earlier to leaders of the Jewish community. Rather than ignoring the problem, they believed they had the capacity to solve it.
They could not. Political criticisms were joined by those of donors and collectors, and the story of an alleged 2019 incident in which Galliano supposedly reacted hostilely upon hearing Hebrew at an Italian spa resurfaced, something his representative denies. By then, the debate had ceased to depend solely on Galliano. It also reached the Met and what it meant for an institution of its weight to decide to turn his professional comeback into a historic consecration.
Fashion has an extraordinary capacity to forgive when talent or business (especially business) justifies it. A museum also answers to its donors, its board, its political representatives, and, in the case of the Metropolitan, an entire city. Wintour had managed for decades to bring those two worlds together until they became one, even when the tribute to Karl Lagerfeld in 2023 sparked protests over some of his statements about women or weight. The attempt to honor Galliano suddenly reminded that, although fashion brings visitors to museums, they have never been the same.
The magnitude of the setback is better understood by recalling everything she did achieve for and from the Met. Since she began co-chairing the gala in 1995, she transformed a society dinner into one of the most visible cultural events on the planet and the main annual source of funding for the Costume Institute. In 2014, when the museum named the renovated space the Anna Wintour Costume Center, it was estimated that she had raised about 125 billion dollars for the institution.
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This year, the gala broke all its records with 42, and part of the income has long been reserved to create a fund that, according to Andrew Bolton, could allow the Costume Institute to finance itself by 2030 or even earlier. Wintour built her power by bringing the museum money, attention, and relevance that it would hardly have achieved without her. The paradox is that that same success may have contributed to the department depending less and less on her ability to provide them.
By then, reservations were also inside the museum. According to Back Row, the exhibition had not received the full board’s approval and had raised internal objections even before being announced. Last Saturday, Bolton wrote to his team to communicate that the project was moving forward; on Monday, it was canceled. That it had come so far despite those resistances says a lot about the authority Wintour had accumulated within the institution. That it ultimately did not go forward says something new.
The defeat also comes at a stage of gradual withdrawal. In 2025 she left the daily direction of American Vogue, although she retains her global positions at Vogue and Condé Nast. We are not facing a woman removed from power, far from it. Nor a woman free from having been questioned. In 2008, the cover featuring LeBron James alongside Gisele Bündchen was accused of reproducing an old racial stereotype; three years later, Vogue published a complacent profile of Asma al-Assad when her husband’s regime was already accumulating human rights violation allegations. In 2020, amid the industry’s reckoning with racism, Wintour had to apologize for not giving enough space to Black professionals and for publishing “hurtful or intolerant” images and texts.
In some way (perhaps many), the editor went through all those controversies without any appreciably altering her authority, and that explains why this time she could believe the same would happen, that her will and the final result were practically the same thing.
Even the exit from this crisis carries some of those late nights. The official statement presented the cancellation as a decision made together with Galliano; the designer published a long statement explaining that he did not want to put the museum in a difficult position. Wintour responded in a few lines that John’s decision was “very brave” and that she had his full support. After personally backing the exhibition, the defeat was framed as a retreat by the honoree.
Galliano will not disappear: this very month his collaboration with Zara is scheduled to launch. The Met will find another exhibition and will fill its stairs again on the first Monday of May. The editor will keep her positions, her seat at the museum, and an influence that would be absurd to consider finished. But she is the only one of the three who comes out of this story with a little less than she had: the certainty, shared by everyone else, that in the end she would get her way.
It may not be the end of Anna Wintour. Endings rarely come with such courtesy. It may be something earlier: the moment when someone discovers they can say no to her and the world keeps turning.
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