Call it “The Devil Wears Galliano.” Wintour reckons that the British designer’s work “combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together in a brilliant way.” Less brilliant was Galliano’s tirade in a Paris cafe in 2011, when cameras captured him screaming at a woman, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead. Your mother, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Witnesses reported that he also called the woman a “fucking ugly Jewish bitch.” He claims to have no memory of the incident due to substance abuse.

Wintour insists that Galliano “isn’t defined by a moment” and says that “John Galliano: Horizons” won’t “shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”           

Wintour is garlanding Galliano with a rare honor. Only two other living designers have been feted by the Met with solo shows: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. 

Wintour has met with Jewish machers such as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and Rabbi Rick Jacobs about the choice of Galliano, who gave it their blessing, citing Galliano’s apologies and contrition. In the wake of the dark incident in the City of Light, he was fired as director of Dior and criminally convicted in a French court. However, he was quickly tapped by esoteric French label Maison Martin Margiela, where he completed a highly successful decade-long run in 2024. He has now taken the reins at mass-market retailer Zara, where he will “re-author” designs from the brand’s archives. 

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Galliano’s genius glowed early. A school collection inspired by post-revolutionary France, “Les Incroyables,” was snapped up by London’s legendary Browns boutique. A 1994 collection inspired by the murdered Romanovs, “Princess Lucretia,” was hailed by Diane von Furstenberg as a “watershed moment in modern fashion history.” Galliano’s bias-cut gowns ruled red carpets in the 1990s and his runways reached for historical phantasmagoria. No Brit had ever led a French couture house until he took over Givenchy in 1995. A year later, he was at Dior, giving the haute a surrealist flair. 

Take the Dior Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999 by Dior under Galliano’s direction. The asymmetrical item was popularized by Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. It simultaneously conjures posh stables; a low-slung, hip-hop aesthetic; and the melting drip of one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks. Knockoffs became a Canal Street staple, and Wintour’s Vogue christened it a “pop culture phenomenon.”

Galliano’s sins, however, are hardly limited to that one outburst in Paris. His biographer, Dana Thomas, contends that honoring him is a “terrible idea” and that “his infamous antisemitic rants were not an aberration.” And beyond the judgment of Galliano’s character — by all accounts, it’s troubled —  lies a more difficult reckoning with fashion’s fascination with cruelty and fanaticism, which all too often has lain behind the glittering surfaces. 

Eighty years before Galliano’s outburst, also in Paris, fashion and fascism were sewn together in Coco Chanel’s atelier. Chanel was just one of many auteurs and geniuses to collaborate with the Nazis and freeze out Jews — Martin Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party until the end, and failed to protect his mentor Edmund Husserl from being fired under anti-Jewish laws. During the war, the French designer — inventor of the little black dress and Chanel No. 5, the best-selling perfume of all time — had a Nazi lover and was in the formal employ of German military intelligence. Chanel also appealed to Aryanization laws to attempt to wrest control of her perfume company from two Jewish partners, proving that allegiance to beauty provides no inoculation against brutality. She received her own Met show in 2005. 

Even worse was Hugo Boss, a German citizen and clothing manufacturer who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and whose company mass-produced the black uniforms of the SS, the brown uniforms of the SA, and the mixed brown and black ones for the Hitler Youth — made in part by forced labor. The company apologized in 2011 for using the labor of 140 French and 40 Polish prisoners. Boss’s imprisoned workers would have sewn the Totenkopf or “Death’s Head” symbol onto the garments intended for concentration camp guards, though Boss was not responsible for the design. After the war he was found to have been an “activist, supporter and beneficiary” of the Third Reich. On appeal, though, he was ruled to have been merely a “fellow traveler” of the regime.  

In a 1975 essay, “Fascinating Fascism,” Susan Sontag coined the phrase “beauty freak” to describe Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl. Sontag means it as something of a compliment — that in movies like Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl was acting not as a “horrid propagandist” but instead as an almost autistic auteur in search of the perfect shot. Fascist art, Sontag writes, “glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.”

Sontag reasoned that “most people who are turned on by SS uniforms are not signifying approval of what the Nazis did,” as if the fashion could be detached from the fascism. In truth, Riefenstahl was hardly ambiguous. In 1937, she gushed that “Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.” One of her films used extras sourced from a concentration camp. They were sent to Auschwitz when the movie wrapped. 

A half-century ago, Sontag predicted that a “revival of Nazi art, following the revivals of Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Art Deco, is most unlikely. The painting and sculpture are not just sententious; they are astonishingly meager as art. But precisely these qualities invite people to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of pop art.” A harder question is presented when the art is rich but the artist is rancid.  

Galliano, then, appears to belong to the tribe of beauty freaks and antisemitic art monsters that includes Riefenstahl, Chanel, and Kanye West, not to mention composer Richard Wagner, poet Ezra Pound, and Voltaire  — and, some might say, Sontag herself, who in an infamous piece appeared to justify the 9/11 attacks as “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”

The raising up of Galliano comes three years after Karl Lagerfeld, who once declared that “no one wants to see curvy women,” was honored at the 2023 Gala. Fashion, it seems, has few untainted heroes to choose from. That honor, though, was posthumous. It also came before the Costume Institute took over prime real estate at the Met. In May, it ascended from the basement to the Condé M. Nast Galleries, adjacent to the Great Hall — the former location of the museum gift shop. 

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In honoring Galliano, Wintour is taking something of a gamble with an event that has become a gilded goose. The Costume Institute has become crucial to the Met’s bottom line. Last year’s Gala brought in $31 million. The museum’s most popular show in history was the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies,” in 2018, which was seen by 1.7 million people. That edged out 1978’s “Treasures of Tutankhamun,” which was viewed by 1.4 million visitors.

The Met contends that “rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values, and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work.” It could be, though, that the old parabola of grace and redemption, as hoary as it is, remains the best shape to map the choice to honor Galliano, who was raised in a devout Catholic family and whose work often bears the imprint of the Church’s couture. 

The Met originally intended to honor Galliano in 2024, but postponed the plan in the wake of the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7, 2023. Those sensitivities appear to have dulled in the years since, even as antisemitism against Jews in New York continues to rise. The New York Police Department reports that antisemitic incidents increased by more than 8% this year, and that more than half of all hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews, who constitute just 10% of the population. Antisemitism is a fashion that is very much back in style. 

In a 2023 documentary, John Galliano: High & Low, Wintour explains that “it isn’t often that you meet a great designer. But when you saw what John was doing, you realized that he was one of them.” Perhaps it is as simple as that — the rules are different for the great and glittering, even if their sins and prejudices are no less ugly than ours. Or perhaps a line ought to be drawn when it comes to the world’s oldest hatred.

Sontag concluded that “Riefenstahl’s current de-Nazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful — as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer — do not augur well for the keenness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst.” Wintour, a lioness in winter, is set to test again if the beautiful ought to bleach the baleful. 

One of her essays for the publication, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” published in December 2016, detonated at precisely the right instant and launched her near-overnight transformation from a pop-culture writer into the #Resistance’s 25-year-old mascot. But the woman whom The New Yorker once crowned the “Millennial feminist warrior queen of social media” is feeling ambivalent about this week’s news that publishing giant Condé Nast is folding Teen Vogue into its flagship website, laying off 70% of its staff, and dissolving its politics desk.

Looking back, the now 34-year-old Duca sees her Teen Vogue persona as, well, kind of an asshole.  She left the magazine in mid-2018 and spent most of the last six years very offline after experiencing a New Age come-to-Jesus moment (that was also an actual come-to-Jesus moment) on psychedelics.

“I was Little Miss Resistance, an image supported by the mainstream media,” she tells me on Thursday. “I was so young and completely emotionally immature and just obsessed with screaming my opinions at the top of my lungs and thinking that that was, like, helping democracy.” She adds: “sometimes it feels like that whole period was a blackout.”

For many of those who came of age during the late-2010s media-politics cyclone, it’s hard to look back with clarity. The immediate present might feel politically alive, what with the earthquake-like election of Zohran Mandami and the daily disruptions of Trump II. Still, it’s eerily muted compared to the years following Trump’s descent from the golden escalator. From 2016 to 2022, politics — thanks to the omnipresence of social media — felt like electricity running through every surface.

The political theorist Anton Jäger coined a label for it: hyperpolitics, the fusion of celebrity, entertainment, and politics, in which breathless outrage and the expression of your personal and political identity online become a kind of civic participation.

In the era of hyperpolitics, it only seemed strange at first when Teen Vogue went woke. The publication began life in 2003 as a spinoff of Vogue, aimed at teenage fashion consumers under the Condé Nast umbrella. In the wake of Trump’s rise, the magazine that once printed stories such as “Ten Ways to Slay at Prom” was suddenly publishing op-eds on climate justice and white supremacy under headlines such as “9 Climate Activists of Color You Should Know.” Executives at Condé Nast were happy with their brush with relevance among young women, even as critics sneered. But the shift made sense.

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Teen Vogue was actually just one of a new wave of websites — Jezebel, Mic, Refinery29 — that served the same restless demographic, who, ironically, weren’t actually teenagers at all but mostly 20- and 30-something women. According to a Washington Examiner report, just 1.7% of Teen Vogue’s May 2018 audience was 17 or younger, and slightly more, 2%, were 18 to 24 years old.

More specifically, the Teen Vogue audience was the kind of economically and culturally ascendant urban, single Millennials soon to become both the Democrats’ most loyal bloc and the Right’s favorite scapegoat. Teen Vogue readers, editors boasted, were no longer just consumers, but now “considered themselves activists.”

Duca did not simply join that moment of hyperpolitics — she was that moment.

Before her viral stardom, Duca was a pop-culture writer, specializing in celebrity profiles and reality-TV analysis. She knew Donald Trump not as a political figure, but a reality-TV character — not that there was much of a difference: Trump accelerated the merging of social media, reality TV, and politics. “I felt qualified to write about [Trump] because he was, in a way, an entertainment product,” Duca says.

What happened after the “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” essay has now become media lore. The piece went viral, drawing millions of views and overwhelming Condé Nast’s servers. Duca was told that Anna Wintour nearly fainted on a train, shocked by both the article and the response to it. Overnight, a magazine built to sell eyeliner became a hub for #Resistance politics; its 25-year-old writer got half a million Twitter followers; and cable-news hosts came calling (she became MSNBC’s Millennial whisperer).

Her subsequent showdown with Tucker Carlson remains one of the strangest artifacts of that era. Carlson had invited Duca on his Fox News show to discuss her tweets about Ivanka Trump. Duca barely knew what Fox News was, and even less about the channel’s fiery prime-time pundit.

“I just thought he was that guy with the bowtie,” she recalls. The conversation quickly imploded into mutual contempt — Carlson sneering that she should stick to writing about Ariana Grande’s “thigh-high boots,” Duca rolling her eyes. As her microphone faded out, she mouthed the words “You’re a sexist pig.”

Duca recalls: “my kind of fundamental reaction was, like, is this middle-aged man bullying me on TV? I was just like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” The debate went viral instantly, and within hours, the clip had been viewed millions of times.

Duca felt like she had to keep riding the wave of fame before it crashed, even as spending up to 15 hours a day glued to screens and political narratives was sending her to a darker place: “it wasn’t just your average internet addiction, because I would fire off a hot take, and then a car would come and pick me up and drive me to MSNBC. Like, it was farm-to-table hot takes. And my tweets would be the news for a not insignificant period of time. It was horrible.”

Soon after the Tucker interview, she launched a new column for Teen Vogue called “Thigh-High Politics.” Simon & Schuster signed her to write a book titled How To Start a Revolution: Young People And The Future of Politics — ambitious stuff for someone who, a year earlier, was still writing celebrity-obsessed stories like “Debby Ryan Just Dyed Her Hair Rose Gold.”

That book, published in 2019, now reads like a time capsule of Millennial liberalism: half manifesto, half motivational poster. The title promised radical transformation; the text offered empowerment slogans and civics lessons written in the language of self-care. The idea that posting, educating, and “raising awareness” could amount to transformational change of national politics was the central illusion of the era — and Duca, like her publication, embodied it at the time.

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She also paid the price for it. In 2019, the same attention economy that had made her a celebrity turned cannibal. BuzzFeed News published a lengthy and relatively catty exposé about her short-lived teaching gig at New York University. It described her as “both a feminist icon of her generation and a phony quasi-journalist who has taken advantage of a few lucky moments in her life.” Duca was portrayed as self-absorbed, erratic, and obsessed with her own brand. The piece was brutal, and Duca’s name became a punchline in the same corners of the internet that had once celebrated.

But she quietly cheered on her cancellation in a twisted way, she said, even as her personal life collapsed along with her reputation. “I took down the old Lauren completely, you know? This person, essentially my avatar, was floating through hyperspace without my input, and I just didn’t really bother defending her anymore,” she said.

The next half-decade of Duca’s life was a total deconstruction of her old self. She got divorced, became a lesbian, briefly joined a psychedelics cult in South America, suffered “ego death,” almost died, found Jesus, moved from New York to Tucson, Ariz., and, of course‚ logged off the endless scroll. And if that sounds like a comedy bit, well, it kind of is. She’s turned it into a one-woman show about her life, How Embarrassing is Jesus?, playing off Broadway. 

Duca in 2025 is an inversion of her old ethos: the once-loud, self-assured political avatar has turned quiet mystic, talking about God, energy, and healing. “I did believe that political action was the driver of a good life,” she tells me. “I had this insatiable energy to be the Millennial feminist warrior queen, and then I didn’t have the energy anymore.”

In many ways, Duca’s decade-long trajectory is an extreme version of the story of the larger Millennial Teen Vogue generation: the first raised entirely online, who experienced politics as a series of viral flashpoints since Trump’s first election in 2016: Bernie rallies, women’s marches, pussy hats, and fist-raising #BLM Instagram graphics. It was addictive, intoxicating, and unsustainable.

Duca once wrote that Trump’s election “made the country spark like an aurora borealis of lightbulb moments.” Even then, she was describing politics as energy rather than institution-building — something to be felt rather than built. Almost a decade later, many who once flooded the streets are now raising children, paying mortgages, practicing mindfulness, or, in Duca’s unusual case, finding Jesus in the form of a praying mantis under the influence of psychedelics.

Teen Vogue is gone. The Lauren Duca who embodied its political moment is gone, too.