The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s announcement this week that it is canceling next year’s exhibition on the fashion of John Galliano perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise. From the start, Galliano was a controversial pick for the museum’s Costume Institute, which launches its new show each year with the splashy Met Gala.
The red carpet, if you can believe it, was once a fashion dead zone, a sequin-strewn wasteland where good taste went to die. For years, many stars served as their own stylist or whipped up their own clothes, with predictably patchy results. In 1989, when Demi Moore showed up to the Academy Awards in a spandex-bike-shorts-and-corset ensemble of her own design, Women’s Wear Daily called it an “Oscar Fright.
As America struggled to recover from a global pandemic, a shattered economy, and record unemployment levels, headlines despaired: “NECKTIES DOOMED.” Men were “slashing their clothing bills” to retailers’ chagrin, the Associated Press reported. Those who continued to wear ties were downgrading from colorful, expensive silk to plain, cheap cotton. The year was 1921, and reports of the tie’s death were premature, to say the least.