Call it “The Devil Wears Galliano.” Wintour reckons that the British designer’s work “combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together in a brilliant way.” Less brilliant was Galliano’s tirade in a Paris cafe in 2011, when cameras captured him screaming at a woman, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mother, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Witnesses reported that he also called the woman a “fucking ugly Jewish bitch.” He claims to have no memory of the incident due to substance abuse.

Wintour insists that Galliano “isn’t defined by a moment” and says that “John Galliano: Horizons” won’t “shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”           

Wintour is garlanding Galliano with a rare honor. Only two other living designers have been feted by the Met with solo shows: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. 

Wintour has met with Jewish machers such as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Rabbi Rick Jacobs about the choice of Galliano, who gave it their blessing, citing Galliano’s apologies and contrition. In the wake of the dark incident in the City of Light, he was fired as director of Dior and criminally convicted in a French court. However, he was quickly tapped by esoteric French label Maison Martin Margiela, where he completed a highly successful decade-long run in 2024. He has now taken the reins at mass-market retailer Zara, where he will “re-author” designs from the brand’s archives. 

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Galliano’s genius glowed early. A school collection inspired by post-revolutionary France, “Les Incroyables,” was snapped up by London’s legendary Browns boutique. A 1994 collection inspired by the murdered Romanovs, “Princess Lucretia,” was hailed by Diane von Furstenberg as a “watershed moment in modern fashion history.” Galliano’s bias-cut gowns ruled red carpets in the 1990s and his runways reached for historical phantasmagoria. No Brit had ever led a French couture house until he took over Givenchy in 1995. A year later, he was at Dior, giving the haute a surrealist flair. 

Take the Dior Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999 by Dior under Galliano’s direction. The asymmetrical item was popularized by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. It simultaneously conjures posh stables; a low-slung, hip-hop aesthetic; and the melting drip of one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks. Knockoffs became a Canal Street staple, and Wintour’s Vogue christened it a “pop culture phenomenon.”

Galliano’s sins, however, are hardly limited to that one outburst in Paris. His biographer, Dana Thomas, contends that honoring him is a “terrible idea” and that “his infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration.” And beyond the judgment of Galliano’s character — by all accounts, it’s troubled —  lies a more difficult reckoning with fashion’s fascination with cruelty and fanaticism, which all too often has lain behind the glittering surfaces. 

Eighty years before Galliano’s outburst, also in Paris, fashion and fascism were sewn together in Coco Chanel’s atelier. Chanel was just one of many auteurs and geniuses to collaborate with the Nazis and freeze out Jews — Martin Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party until the end, and failed to protect his mentor Edmund Husserl from being fired under anti-Jewish laws. During the war, the French designer — inventor of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5, the best-selling perfume of all time — had a Nazi lover and was in the formal employ of German military intelligence. Chanel also appealed to Aryanization laws to attempt to wrest control of her perfume company from two Jewish partners, proving that allegiance to beauty provides no inoculation against brutality. She received her own Met show in 2005. 

Even worse was Hugo Boss, a German citizen and clothing manufacturer who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and whose company mass-produced the black uniforms of the SS, the brown uniforms of the SA, and the mixed brown and black ones for the Hitler Youth — made in part by forced labor. The company apologized in 2011 for using the labor of 140 French and 40 Polish prisoners. Boss’s imprisoned workers would have sewn the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol onto the garments intended for concentration camp guards, though Boss was not responsible for the design. After the war he was found to have been an “activist, supporter and beneficiary” of the Third Reich. On appeal, though, he was ruled to have been merely a “fellow traveler” of the regime.  

In a 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag coined the phrase “beauty freak” to describe Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag means it as something of a compliment — that in movies like Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl was acting not as a “horrid propagandist” but instead as an almost autistic auteur in search of the perfect shot. Fascist art, Sontag writes, “glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”

Sontag reasoned that “most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did,” as if the fashion could be detached from the fascism. In truth, Riefenstahl was hardly ambiguous. In 1937, she gushed that “Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.” One of her films used extras sourced from a concentration camp. They were sent to Auschwitz when the movie wrapped. 

A half-century ago, Sontag predicted that a “revival of Nazi art, following the revivals of Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Art Deco, is most unlikely. The painting and sculpture are not just sententious; they are astonishingly meager as art. But precisely these qualities invite people to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of pop art.” A harder question is presented when the art is rich but the artist is rancid.  

Galliano, then, appears to belong to the tribe of beauty freaks and antisemitic art monsters that includes Riefenstahl, Chanel, and Kanye West, not to mention composer Richard Wagner, poet Ezra Pound, and Voltaire  — and, some might say, Sontag herself, who in an infamous piece appeared to justify the 9/11 attacks as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”

The raising up of Galliano comes three years after Karl Lagerfeld, who once declared that “no one wants to see curvy women,” was honored at the 2023 Gala. Fashion, it seems, has few untainted heroes to choose from. That honor, though, was posthumous. It also came before the Costume Institute took over prime real estate at the Met. In May, it ascended from the basement to the Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to the Great Hall — the former location of the museum gift shop. 

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In honoring Galliano, Wintour is taking something of a gamble with an event that has become a gilded goose. The Costume Institute has become crucial to the Met’s bottom line. Last year’s Gala brought in $31 million. The museum’s most popular show in history was the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies,” in 2018, which was seen by 1.7 million people. That edged out 1978’s “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which was viewed by 1.4 million visitors.

The Met contends that “rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values, and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work.” It could be, though, that the old parabola of grace and redemption, as hoary as it is, remains the best shape to map the choice to honor Galliano, who was raised in a devout Catholic family and whose work often bears the imprint of the Church’s couture. 

The Met originally intended to honor Galliano in 2024, but postponed the plan in the wake of the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. Those sensitivities appear to have dulled in the years since, even as antisemitism against Jews in New York continues to rise. The New York Police Department reports that antisemitic incidents increased by more than 8% this year, and that more than half of all hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews, who constitute just 10% of the population. Antisemitism is a fashion that is very much back in style. 

In a 2023 documentary, John Galliano: High & Low, Wintour explains that “it isn’t often that you meet a great designer. But when you saw what John was doing, you realized that he was one of them.” Perhaps it is as simple as that — the rules are different for the great and glittering, even if their sins and prejudices are no less ugly than ours. Or perhaps a line ought to be drawn when it comes to the world’s oldest hatred.

Sontag concluded that “Riefenstahl’s current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful — as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer — do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst.” Wintour, a lioness in winter, is set to test again if the beautiful ought to bleach the baleful. 

There is, however, something different about this evening’s show. The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”, focuses on 50 historical pieces from its collection that are too fragile to be worn again. So far, so haute couture. But while the dress code for the Gala follows the same logic, it also takes inspiration from an unlikely source: guests are invited to take their lead from “The Garden of Time”, a 1962 short story by J. G. Ballard.

It is impossible as a Ballard fan not to be excited by this unexpected turn of events. One imagines that it would have delighted such a close student of contemporary culture and keen analyst of celebrity. And, though hardly a style icon (he dressed generally like the Surrey dad he was), Ballard took fashion seriously. In his autobiography, Miracles of Life, Ballard praised the social revolution of the Sixties for, among other things, “the use of fashion as a political weapon” (as well as for “the youth cults and drug culture”).

Nor is this the first time the fashion world has taken an interest in Jimmy’s work. In fact, he contributed to British Vogue himself twice in the late Seventies. During that period, Vogue employed a literary editor, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, and Ballard, seen as something of a provocateur following his “urban disaster” trilogy of novels (Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise), was well-connected in literary circles. The resulting collaborations, “The Future of the Future” and “The Diary of a Mad Space Wife”, were speculative futurological pieces, containing the vivid insights for which he continues to be renowned, alongside some predictive misses.

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So, the recreation of Ballard in the unlikely guise of a fashion guru is a cause for considerable celebration. But how might those lucky enough to attend the Gala respond to the theme? If you’re on the list and need some last-minute inspiration, read on. You’ll want to be fully Ballard-conversant, so scroll down for the deep-cut style tips. (A shortcut for anyone wanting to pay tribute to the man himself: think gin o’clock vibes — cream linen suit and striped shirt — and you won’t go far wrong.)

The obvious place to start is the story itself. “The Garden of Time” imagines an aristocratic couple, Count Axel and his wife the Countess, living a life of luxurious leisure in a beautiful villa with terraced gardens nearby a lake. While they spend their days in the library, or drawing room, reading rare volumes and playing Bach on the harpsichord, a mob approaches across the plain beyond the low garden walls: “a vast throng of people, men and women, interspersed with a few soldiers in ragged uniforms, pressing forward in a disorganised tide”. By picking the time flowers in their garden, the Count and Countess can turn back the clock for the period of time it takes for a bloom to shed its petals. The time flowers, though, are running out, and the mob draws ever closer. On the night the Countess picks the final bloom the mob flood over the wall to discover two stone statues in the garden.

As a parable for the times in which we live, it’s hard to beat. As parts of the planet become uninhabitable, and the movement of people across the globe breeds new conflicts, the super-rich are noticeably retreating to islands, gated communities, and the bunkers on their New Zealand estates. But in the context of the elite Met Gala, the choice of this story is ambiguous at best: is the fashion world trolling those of us too poor to buy Stella McCartney? The 99% of us excluded from the A-list events?

Those who want to show they’ve done their homework can take pointers from the Count and Countess. Axel is “a tall, imperious figure in a black velvet jacket, a gold tie-pin glinting below his George V beard, cane held stiffly in a white-gloved hand”. The Countess, meanwhile, wears a brocade dress. “Her face was serene and intelligent, her hair swept back behind her head into a jewelled clasp, touched with silver. She wore her dress low across her breast, revealing a long slender neck and high chin.” It’s easy to imagine Ms Wintour’s attention caught by these details as she leafed through Ballard’s Collected Short Stories.

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But in the context of Ballard’s larger oeuvre, “The Garden of Time” isn’t actually the obvious choice for inspiration. Intriguingly, there is a much more fashion-focused option from Ballard’s short fiction, concerned almost entirely with futuristic speculation. The Seventies story “Say Goodbye to the Wind” is set within Ballard’s imagined Vermillion Sands resort, whose “spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach”, and which was Ballard’s “guess at what the future will actually be like” when “work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work”.

The story is centred on a boutique that sells bio-fabric fashions: “Clothes are no longer made from dead fibres of fixed colour and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure, but from living tissues that adapt themselves to the contours and personality of the wearer.” Many of the beach designs sold at the boutique are in op-art styles, so vintage Quant might be one way to go. And while we haven’t yet quite cracked bio-fabrics, any panicked and underdressed celebs might try a call to Polish fashion designer Iga Węglińska, who made two tops in 2021 designed to change colour or flash with lights in response to feelings of stress or anxiety.

All this is well and good, but seasoned Ballard watchers will be wanting his waspish attitude to pierce the apparently sophisticated veneer of style. In the second of his novels to fictionalise elements of his own life, The Kindness of Women, a sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard commented wryly on the tendency within fashion to épater les bourgeois. It was a tendency he recognised well: “One of Cleo’s fashion magazines showed some models prancing about in front of a blow-up from the Zapruder film – the Kennedy assassination as a fashion accessory?”

His later-period work further satirised this inclination towards fashion edginess. In the novel Millennium People (2003), a middle-class terrorist militia movement based in south-west London becomes a fashion inspiration: people wear “camouflage fatigues and military webbing, part of the new guerrilla chic inspired by Chelsea Marina that had already featured in an Evening Standard fashion spread”. A bit too street for such a glitzy event? Perhaps. In which case, the statement offering suggested in the short “The Object of the Attack” (1984) might be a bit more to your taste: “Already the disguised fashion-accessory holster worn by Princess Diana has inspired a substantial copycat industry, and London is filled with young women wearing stylised codpieces (none of them realise why).”

These deadpan satirical flourishes do pose a number of questions: what are we to make of the fact that the work of a writer who so surgically anatomised contemporary culture’s celebrity obsessions from his suburban home has now become fodder for the ultimate red-carpet event? Do the notoriously enervated and excessive doyennes of the fashion world see themselves in Ballard’s visions of hyper-aristocracy? Do they “feel seen”? There is something delicious and ambiguous about the Ballardian Met. The author who began playing with his own fictional representation as early as Crash and who took great delight in a walk-on part as John Bull in Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun would surely have watched with great relish to see how the current crop of Liz Taylors and Jayne Mansfields interpret his early work. “Nothing is real, everything is fake.” He has strolled into the heart of the gated community.

One of the holy sacraments of Ballardian mythology surrounds his notorious story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, a Crash-era piece in the style of a scientific report acutely describing psychosexual responses to the then California governor’s subliminal appeal. It is rumoured — possibly apocryphally — to have been circulated under a Republican Party letterhead at a Republican conference in 1980, where it was taken for what it appeared to be: “a position paper by a renegade think tank”. Ballard always aimed for ambiguity and this has always entailed the possibility of, shall we say, distinct readings. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that tonight’s attendees who have read it will be likely to empathise with the Count and Countess in “The Garden of Time”. But for how long can they keep the hordes at the other side of the garden wall by pulling on just one more fragile frock?