“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,” wrote Dana Thomas, his biographer, in a guest essay in The Times. In 2011 a French court convicted him of a pair of hate crimes for antisemitic and anti-Asian tirades at a Paris bar. He apologized for the behavior, claiming he had been high and drunk.

But these were not isolated events. A video of a separate incident from 2010 captured him telling patrons of the same bar, “I love Hitler,” adding, “Your mothers, your forefathers would be fucking gassed.” In 2019, according to the fashion publicist Lauren London, Galliano “started screaming ‘Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas’” when he overheard a woman speaking Hebrew at an alcohol-free Italian spa. “When my friend asked him if he had a problem with Hebrew he promptly and very unapologetically responded that he did.” London’s friend and her daughter have confirmed the incident; a spokesman for Galliano says he denies it.

Galliano’s troubled history was a secret to nobody when the museum decided to honor him, thanks largely to the tireless championship of Anna Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and a longtime trustee of the Met. It was a reminder that high fashion and good judgment only rarely coincide.

For starters, the date of the gala coincided with Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Whoops. Then the museum thought it could mollify the Jewish community by arranging meetings between Galliano and prominent rabbis so they could offer their benediction. But it seems not to have reckoned with Julie Menin, the speaker of New York’s City Council, who denounced the tribute to Galliano as “wholly inappropriate” and a “serious mistake” at a time of steeply rising anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city. The city helps fund the Met to the tune of millions of dollars a year.

There was also the palaver from Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Met’s Costume Institute. Bolton promised that the planned show would open with an “orientation gallery” on Galliano’s transgressions that could “provide context” for visitors. It was a touch of self-important backside covering for a show whose overriding, if unwritten, political message would have been that Jew hatred, unlike most other forms of bigotry, is a survivable mistake in elite Western culture today. As Elisha Wiesel said last week, “If someone had screamed the worst racial epithet you can imagine, said, ‘You’re a horrible Black person, and your ancestors would have been hung from a tree,’ you could not imagine them being honored by a prominent cultural institution.”