DISPATCHES FROM CERULEAN BLUE STATES: Will Anna Wintour survive the Galliano debacle?

This has not gone well. A source told Page Six that “Anna singlehandedly thought she could willfully get [Galliano] back in [fashion]. She’s been at it a long time, and she really misjudged it, and she made him vulnerable while doing that… she’s not reading the fucking room… she really overplayed her hand. They really need to take a beat, take a year off, because people don’t have time for this shit right now.”

Wintour’s loyalty to Galliano was first demonstrated in 2013 – a mere two years after he was fired from Dior for the aforementioned comments – when she wangled him a residency with Oscar de la Renta, and then again the following year when she was instrumental in his becoming creative director of Maison Margiela, a role that he held for a decade. Wintour specifically asked, in 2014, for Galliano to present her with the award for Outstanding Achievement at the British Fashion Awards, and wore a Margiela by John Galliano design to receive it.

Vanessa Friedman wrote on the New York Times’s “On The Runway” blog at the time that “as fashion world blessings go, it was about as unambiguous as anything I’ve seen.” Wintour, it seems, was uninterested in Galliano’s private life or personal wrongdoings. For her, it was about the fashion.

Now, it seems as if the savviest woman in the industry might have made a misstep – and embarrassed the Met in the process. Wintour would have been aware of the unfortunate precedent being set – no Met honoree has had to quit before and no exhibition of this stature has been canceled – and the humiliation that all this involves. She will doubtless have bristled at an admonitory statement put out by Zohran Mamdani’s office: “John Galliano’s repeated use of anti-Semitic language is vile. The Mamdani administration recognizes that the Met’s decision to honor him has caused pain and anger among many Jewish New Yorkers. The Met is an independent institution and its decisions – and how it responds to the many Jewish New Yorkers appalled by this choice – are ultimately its own. But independence does not mean insulation from criticism.”

When even the anti-Israel Mamdani administration is hesitant about mainstreaming an (alleged) antisemite, attempting to rehabilitate Galliano may have been a step too far for someone whose magazine previously referred to Mrs. Bashar al-Assad as a “Rose in the Desert:”