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. In 2011, he lost his job as creative director of Dior after a video surfaced of him making a drunken anti-Semitic rant; later that year, a French court found him guilty of the crime of making anti-Semitic and anti-Asian insults. The New York Times also recently described claims that Galliano had made anti-Semitic comments during an outburst in 2019. (Through a spokesperson, Galliano denied the 2019 episode.)But not long after his Dior exit, Galliano—who has always traded on his bad-boy image while producing clothes of astounding beauty and theatricality—was welcomed back into the industry. After so publicly hitting rock-bottom, the designer, who said addiction to drugs and alcohol led to the rants, apologized and went to rehab. Maison Margiela then hired him. Celebrities such as Zendaya wore his designs; this year, the fast-fashion retailer Zara announced a partnership with him to great excitement. Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director and the Met Gala’s chair, also happens to be his longtime friend and champion. In the process of planning the Met show, Galliano, Wintour, and Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, consulted with Jewish leaders, and the exhibition itself intended to—as the museum initially announced in July—explore how the designer’s “derogatory conduct” had “fundamentally altered his career and public reception.”[Read: Yet another wasted Met Gala]Those efforts did little to assuage wider public opinion. Museum donors threatened to pull funding; the speaker of the New York City Council called the choice of Galliano a “serious mistake.” On Monday, the museum released a statement saying that the show “will not proceed as planned.” It was, Wintour said in the statement, “the right decision.”It is also a blow to the museum and its reputation that could have been avoided. For most of the Costume Institute’s 80-year history, it has followed an unofficial rule: Don’t do a solo show about a living designer—because such an exhibition could be seen as a form of advertising instead of scholarship, especially if the designer has curatorial input. Although such shows are now commonplace, the Met’s fashion wing has always prided itself on “setting the standard” for conservation and collection, and has devoted only two exhibitions to living designers: Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. Both were controversial exceptions to long-standing norms intended to separate cultural analysis from commercialism.Putting on a museum exhibition of Galliano’s work, even while interrogating his past behavior, was always going to be ethically dicey because the designer still stands to benefit from the publicity and prestige that the show bestows. This saga suggests that the Costume Institute, and perhaps all fashion museums, should forgo retrospectives of living artists—and revisit why rules discouraging them were necessary to begin with.Museums have been routinely collecting and displaying clothes as a branch of the decorative arts since the 19th century, but early fashion exhibits typically featured only historical dress. Contemporary fashion was considered insufficiently artistic, and highlighting it was seen as overly promotional. But as fashion designers became household names in the 1960s, more and more contemporary pieces found their way into thematic exhibitions. Usually, the items were in shows featuring the work of several designers, including at the Met, which minimized the appearance of endorsing a particular label.The Costume Institute, which opened to the public in 1946, didn’t devote an entire show to an individual living designer until 1983, when Diana Vreeland―a former Vogue editor in chief―curated a retrospective of Yves Saint Laurent’s work in honor of his label’s 25th anniversary. Saint Laurent was involved in the exhibition and attended the opening fundraiser, both of which were underwritten by the firm that had long designed his textiles. The decision was contentious. Critics argued that it canonized a designer whose work had not yet stood the test of time, while blurring the boundary between art and advertising.The general public, though, was clearly captivated: The show drew more than 125,000 visitors in just its first month at a time when the average Met exhibition drew 500,000 visitors a year, Women’s Wear Daily reported. Despite its popularity, the experiment was not repeated under the next curator, or the next. Indeed, the Times later reported that the Costume Institute had adopted an “unofficial policy” of not doing monographic shows on living designers due to the “charges of commercialism” that the exhibition drew.Designers, however, took note of the public’s growing interest in fashion heritage and realized that their own histories could be a valuable source of design inspiration and cultural capital. In 1987, Dior created an archives department; most major fashion labels followed. Fashion-industry archivists started competing with museum curators to buy back their own vintage pieces at auction. Some fashion houses founded their own museums. Others turned their archives into touring exhibitions, large on spectacle and light on scholarship.[Read: Confessions of a costume curator]By no coincidence, over the course of the 1990s, fashion studies gained traction as an academic discipline. “Suddenly, fashion was about identity, the body, gender, power, and visual representation,” Valerie Steele, a fashion historian and curator, wrote in Reinvention and Restlessness, a book created for an exhibition at the Museum at FIT. Fashion did not just explain the past, the thinking went, but also expressed the ambitions and anxieties of the present.But the mingling of intellectual analysis and business interests hasn’t occurred without debate: Privately owned objects aren’t subject to the same strict conservation requirements as museum artifacts. And as museums started borrowing archival pieces directly from fashion houses, sometimes a designer’s “cooperation” with an exhibition stretched to input or approval―another ethical gray area that can compromise curatorial objectivity and authority.The ethics of fashion exhibitions got even more questionable in 2000, when the Guggenheim mounted a show about the Italian designer Giorgio Armani. The museum, which does not collect fashion, received a $15 million donation from the designer; the move was widely viewed as a transparent quid pro quo. “It’s all very well for an art gallery to declare the equality of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, and to enjoy the boost in attendance that may bring,” one critic wrote at the time, “but the challenges and risks of shows like this can outweigh any benefits.”Whether they’re focused on pants or paintings, museum exhibitions don’t just publicize and promote the work of living artists; their imprimatur actually raises its market value. The Armani show had the distinction of prompting a museum-industry trade group and the IRS to update their ethical guidelines on corporate sponsorship to encourage greater transparency.Still, shows about living designers―produced with the help of those designers―became more common, and eventually they lost much of their stigma. For many years, in fact, the Met was one of the few holdouts. Its policy changed only when Bolton became curator in charge in 2016 and announced a show on the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo. Bolton, according to a Times report, explicitly “wanted to challenge the idea” that museums couldn’t do monographs on living designers, and wanted to “demonstrate that ‘fashion is a living art.’” Kawakubo’s involvement was crucial to the museum’s show; every piece came from her archives, and that year, she served as the honorary chair for the Met Gala.Galliano, with his past behavior, complicates the ethics equation even more. Museums, of course, regularly exhibit works by artists with unsavory pasts—but, crucially, those artists are usually dead. They can no longer personally profit or walk the red carpet on opening night. And unlike fine art, fashion is built in to everyday consumerism. Few people can afford to leave a museum and buy a Basquiat. Many more can pop over to Zara for a piece from Galliano’s forthcoming collection.The art of fashion may be too enmeshed with the business of fashion for the two to ever be completely untangled. But museums can easily forestall self-inflicted scandals such as the one at the Met by not putting living designers on precarious pedestals. In the announcement of the show’s cancellation, Wintour called the move “John’s decision”; many news outlets subsequently reported that the designer “bowed out” or “withdrew” from the exhibition. This framing casts the news as Galliano’s noble self-sacrifice, and distances Wintour and the Met from the whole sorry affair. It also inadvertently highlights the conflict of interest central to this kind of show. An ethical, independent museum exhibition could have gone on without its subject’s participation. Or, better yet, it would not have sought its subject’s input in the first place.