This show, titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” promises to enshrine him among fashion’s greatest couturiers. But his fame will always have an asterisk attached. As the museum noted in its announcement: “Alongside Galliano’s extraordinary creative accomplishments, the exhibition will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception. In doing so, the exhibition will consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.”

In other words, unlike most fashion retrospectives, which invite visitors to admire opulent gowns made for the rich and famous, with “John Galliano: Horizons,” the Met is attempting to tackle questions regarding cultural memory, accountability, rehabilitation and reputation. In the process, it is asserting the ability of powerful cultural institutions to decide when achievements of talent outweigh failures of morality.

Our culture offers endless examples of artists who behave disgracefully and are revered nonetheless, and high fashion — to some degree an explicit celebration of wealth inequality — has never been the place to look for lessons on virtue. Even so, Mr. Galliano’s rehabilitation, indeed his coronation, is a remarkable turn of events. As Mr. Galliano’s biographer, I think it is a terrible idea.

His infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration. From his early days as a struggling designer in London and Paris through his time at the heights of the fashion industry, Mr. Galliano was known to be verbally abusive to employees, friends and strangers alike. He “talked trash” about everyone in his sphere, Jacqui Duclos, head of the John Galliano brand in the early 1990s, once told me. “No one escaped him.”

The fashion business has long been known to tolerate bad behavior; addiction, provocation, and eccentricity are seen as normal, and at times necessary, elements of the creative process. Mr. Galliano’s comportment went way beyond all that. He had a habit of being extravagantly careless with appointments, even with people (like Madonna) who could have had a big impact on his company’s sales. In 1996 he made headlines in the industry press for shunting aside his close friend and creative partner Amanda Harlech when he went to Dior, and then publicly cutting her out of his life. At some point in the mid-2000s he reportedly spent several hours naked in the elevator of the Ritz hotel in London, growling at guests who tried to enter and telling them he was a lion; he was subsequently ejected from the hotel.