Gruesome Gala for Galliano Gone

The best part of my job is alliterative titles. Mine may not be the best, but I’m pretty proud of this one.

I’m not much taken with John Galliano. Regardless of his talents—even his genius—anti-Semites like Galliano tend to leave me cold. What can I say? I’m one of those snowflake Jews. We’re the delicate flowers who feel mightily offended when the mask suddenly drops and the beast emerges. Call it the occupational hazard of living in history. When your tribe has been “selected” on the train platform at Auschwitz, you develop a certain feeling about fangs and talons. At the very least, they get under my skin.

Galliano is most certainly talented. You wouldn’t know it to look at my ill-fitting pants, but I pay a lot of attention to clothing of all kinds. He once made a gown that looked like a galleon sailing with age-of-exploration pride across the Atlantic.

But Galliano’s garments feel overwrought to me, the fever dream of a class-bound aristocrat or a folklorist trafficking in ethnic costumery. He dresses himself with a kind of hysterical enthusiasm, one day a matador, the next a rakish pirate. But who am I to argue with the experts? If Anna Wintour, immortalized by Meryl Streep, wanted to honor him at the next Costume Institute Gala at the Met, who am I to second-guess a goddess? Anna Wintour hung the moon, and she has every right to bestow it on Galliano.

The problem is that he is a vile anti-Semite, a Mel Gibson type fueled by drugs and alcohol who inconveniently explodes in public places, like a bar in Paris in 2011. Then, to add a kind of violent exclamation point, he did it again sometime later, turning to people he thought might be Jews and hoping aloud that their ancestors had been gassed. He suffered professionally for these nuclear detonations, losing his position at the “House” of Dior, but it’s hard to keep an anti-Semite down. It didn’t much affect Richard Wagner and it has hardly ruined the same lamentable Mel Gibson, who keeps pulling the intestines out of his belly with, apparently, no ill effect. Just last week he mocked an ASL interpreter. He is very much an equal-opportunity bigot.

Galliano, of course, quickly recouped, thanks to the theater of public apology. First there were the claims of substance abuse and addiction. Then messages of contrition to the world press, sit-downs with rabbis, and interviews with survivors. I find the last element of the process especially cringe. Does anyone else resent this engineering? Manipulating elderly survivors of the Holocaust to be part of someone’s pilgrimage of atonement? It’s a lot to ask anyone to bestow absolution, let alone someone who was almost gassed.

The problem, of course, is that Galliano may have been faking it. The language was beautiful—perfectly calibrated. He accepted responsibility without too many errors like “If I have offended anyone, I didn’t mean it.” That would have been the opposite of how these things are done.

The problem is that Galliano’s problem is fatal. In a widely reported incident this summer, he erupted again in another setting years after the initial incidents in Paris. The “cause” was an overheard phone call in Hebrew which triggered something deep and repellent in his soul. Losing control, he tried to drown it out, as if the sound of Hebrew was intolerable to his ears. You will be tempted to say that this is hardly genocide. I will be tempted to say it’s a sign of derangement,

None of this, of course, would matter much if not for the intervention of Anna Wintour. It’s not enough that Galliano has been working again, with many friends in business and fashion. As the most significant fashion doyenne of our time, Wintour felt it was time to redeem her friend and so she planned her annual gala at the Met around him. An anti-Semite might be intolerable to the rest of us, but Ms. Wintour has a different set of standards: the drape of a hem, the shimmer of embroidery. There is no such thing as morality in a cuff.

Everyone knows the rest of the story. When Jews protested, Wintour and her team at the museum summoned muckety-muck rabbis to somehow extricate her from crisis. They did what they were expected to do, but it wasn’t enough for front-line philanthropists. To their enormous credit they stood their ground and (decorously) told Anna Wintour to go to hell. There are simply some lines that should never be crossed.

But that still doesn’t make a difference to Anna Wintour. Galliano pulled himself out of the plan. There will be no gala because he said so. But there has been no word of contrition from his patroness and sponsor. In her narrow understanding of fashion and fundraising, she decided that Jews (and other good people) simply didn’t matter and she put them all together in a classic no-win. Either they would be seen as complicit in her scheme or as delicate little snowflakes who couldn’t stand a drunken rant.

In the meantime, I’m glad the Jews chose against complicity. In a moment of surging hostility toward my community, plainspoken opposition was the better option. Friends don’t sacrifice friends for a gala, even if it’s at the Metropolitan Museum.