I spent a decade working with Anna Wintour on the Met Gala the John Galliano fiasco makes us ask what legacies are honored

My career in fashion began at Vogue, where I spent more than a decade working alongside Anna Wintour producing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Benefit and helping shape what became the Met Gala.I saw firsthand how deliberately its world was constructed: the guest lists, relationships, seating, sponsors, celebrities, and editorial vision that transformed a New York museum benefit into a global cultural event.The public saw fashion and spectacle.

I saw the power behind it: the power to make careers, elevate designers, and shape fashion history. An invitation could change a career.Anna’s support could confer stature.

A Costume Institute exhibition could cement a legacy.Anna Wintour’s impact on the Costume Institute is undeniable.Her genius was as strategic as it was aesthetic.

She harnessed exclusivity, celebrity, and attention to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the Costume Institute and expand its global reach. Anna has long championed John Galliano.That is why the decision to devote the Costume Institute’s 2027 exhibition to Galliano carried such weight.

Galliano’s antisemitism and racism were not confined to a single incident.In separate encounters, he directed antisemitic and racist abuse at others.

In recorded footage, he declared, “I love Hitler,” said that people like those he was addressing should be dead, and invoked their mothers and forefathers being gassed.A Paris court later found him guilty of public insults, and Dior fired him.

Yet John Galliano: Horizons would have given him one of the Costume Institute’s rarest distinctions: a major exhibition devoted to his career, amplified by a Met Gala scheduled for May 3, the evening Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — was to begin.Much has been made of Galliano’s apologies, recovery, and return to fashion.He received his second chance.

The industry welcomed him back, and he rebuilt his career.But a return to success is not proof of redemption, a...