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.
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.
