Fashion Keeps Debating John Galliano. It’s Ignoring Its Jewish History.

John Galliano Kevin Tachman/MG19/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a blockbuster exhibition celebrating John Galliano, the designer whose career collapsed after a drunken antisemitic tirade in which he professed admiration for Adolf Hitler and told two café patrons their ancestors “would all have been fucking gassed,” it reignited a debate over redemption, accountability and whether fashion was embracing one of its most infamous offenders at a moment of heightened concern over antisemitism.

For Hadley Freeman, those questions are more than academic. The London-based author, Sunday Times columnist and former fashion reporter grew up hearing stories of her great-uncle Alex Maguy, a Jewish couturier who hired a young Christian Dior, escaped deportation during the Holocaust and later rebuilt his career with Dior’s help. Freeman chronicles her family’s extraordinary story in her 2021 memoir House of Glass.

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Drawing on both that family history and decades covering the fashion industry, Freeman sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to explain why she believes Galliano’s rehabilitation should not be conflated with today’s rise in antisemitism, while arguing that fashion has done far too little to recognize the indispensable role Jews played in building the industry.

Let’s start with the headline. What was your reaction when you heard the Costume Institute was mounting an exhibition devoted to John Galliano?

I wasn’t surprised. Anna Wintour has been a big supporter of his for a long time and played a big part in helping his rehabilitation after that whole scandal. I’m not a punitive person. I don’t believe he should be drummed out of society. He has addressed what he did and seems genuinely sorry. He’s a brilliant designer who made a terrible mistake while struggling with terrible addictions. As long as it wasn’t brushed under the carpet, and I don’t think anyone can say that it was, I’m fine with him being appreciated for his work.

You don’t see the exhibition as problematic?

Not really. It happened a long time ago. He expressed sorrow. He lost his job at Dior. Since then he’s worked very quietly. I don’t think he needs to be driven from public life forever.

I also don’t think the exhibition reflects the rise of antisemitism we’ve seen around the world since October 7. I see those as two separate things.

Is there no one else worth feting? Is Galliano simply that important as a designer?

He really is. There are other great designers, but Galliano is a unique talent. The only real equivalent from that generation was Alexander McQueen, and the Met has already done a McQueen exhibition. Galliano could have been a designer in any era. He was extraordinary.

His life was completely derailed by what happened that night in Paris. I think he deserves to be appreciated for his talent, while also acknowledging what he did.

You covered Galliano’s trial in France.

I did, and it was terrible. It was also good to see how seriously France took it. Their antisemitism laws are very strong. Dior dropped him immediately even though he had been their golden child, and that was the right thing to do.

People joke about “canceled” comedians disappearing for two years and then coming back with a world tour. That’s not what happened with Galliano. It completely changed his life. He worked anonymously at Maison Margiela. He never gave some big self-pitying interview. He stayed behind the scenes and focused on the work.

Anna Wintour was one of the people who early on supported his return. Was that troubling?

At the time I did think people rushed too quickly to defend him, not just Anna but others too. I think she viewed him through the lens of addiction. For me, what he said was completely shocking. Addiction can make you do many things. I don’t think it makes you become a bigot.

But Galliano isn’t comparable to Kanye West. Kanye has made antisemitic statements repeatedly over a long period of time. Galliano seems to have had one catastrophic public episode and immediately suffered enormous consequences.

You don’t think this is a questionable decision in light of what’s happening today regarding the global rise of antisemitism?

No. The Galliano incident had nothing to do with Israel or the kinds of excuses some people are using today for antisemitism. It happened 15 or 16 years ago and feels separate from this moment. If a designer today were making openly antisemitic statements in the current climate, that would be a different conversation.

One thing that struck me is that fashion owes so much to Jews, yet that history often feels overlooked.

Absolutely. It’s actually personal for me. My great-uncle Alex was a Polish Jewish refugee who came to Paris in the 1920s. His brother became a tailor in the Marais, which is what many Eastern European Jews did. Alex wanted to become a couturier.

He needed someone to draw his designs because he couldn’t draw, so he hired a young aspiring artist who had been disowned by his wealthy family for wanting to become an artist. That young artist was Christian Dior. They remained friends for years.

Your family story during the war is remarkable.

Alex and his brother were deported. His brother was murdered. Alex escaped from the deportation train. When I was researching my book, I discovered the records proving he had boarded the train but never arrived at Auschwitz. I tracked down the French family that hid him during the war, and their daughter showed me the attic where he and his boyfriend, another Jewish designer, survived in hiding.

Growing up, Alex always simply said he had escaped from the train. He never mentioned the boyfriend or the attic. I never really believed the story until I found the documentation.

And Christian Dior remained loyal to him after the war?

Yes. During the occupation Dior was working for Lucien Lelong, like many designers who remained in Paris, making clothes for the wives of Nazi and Vichy officials because those were essentially the only clients left. After the war, when my great-uncle returned, everything he owned had been taken. Christian Dior helped him rebuild his career.

What’s fascinating is that Dior’s own family reflected France’s contradictions. His sister Catherine was a resistance hero who survived Ravensbrück, a concentration camp. But another member of the family enthusiastically supported the Nazis. France was an incredibly complicated place during the occupation.

How should we think about Coco Chanel’s wartime record?

I understand the pressures people were under, but Coco Chanel made choices she didn’t have to make. She had a relationship with a Nazi officer. What she did was terrible. I think there’s still a tendency to whitewash that history. There was a film about her years ago that did that, and more recently an exhibition that barely mentioned it or suggested she was somehow secretly working against the Nazis. I don’t think that’s true. We should acknowledge what happened.

You make the point that Jews were the backbone of the industry.

Exactly. A lot of Eastern European Jewish refugees arrived in France after the pogroms and worked as tailors and seamstresses for the couture houses. Many settled in the Marais, which was the Jewish neighborhood of Paris. Those artisans were essential to the industry, but during the occupation they were also among the first people Vichy targeted for deportation. They were the first to be sent to the camps before the authorities turned to French Jews. It’s an industry that has always relied on Jewish skill to a certain extent, but it hasn’t necessarily acknowledged that history.

Even today you have figures like Ralph Lauren, whose story I find fascinating. Here’s a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who creates this idealized vision of American WASP life and then sells it back to America. It’s similar to what Jewish founders did in Hollywood. They created an image of America that they themselves had largely been excluded from.

That sounds very much like Neal Gabler’s thesis in An Empire of Their Own.

Exactly. It’s one of my favorite books. You can make the same comparison with Hollywood, with Condé Nast under Si Newhouse, and with Ralph Lauren. It’s a fascinating tradition of outsiders creating the culture they were excluded from.

The Academy Museum recently expanded its recognition of Jewish founders after criticism. Should fashion do something similar?

I would love to see that. Some of the most important figures in 20th Century fashion were Jewish, from designers to editors to department store pioneers. Jewish immigrants played an enormous role in building the industry.

The Costume Institute recently mounted an exhibition about Black style. I’d love to see one devoted to the history of Jews in fashion because it’s every bit as rich and important. While I don’t think Galliano should be driven from public life forever, I do think museums could do a much better job acknowledging the role Jews have played in creating the fashion industry itself.