Metropolitan Museum

Friday

Agnes Dauti

The Met museum has humiliated John Galliano

John Galliano’s reign at Dior was before my time. But he was the first Brit to put his mark on a great French couture house and, in any way you care to look at it, he has been one of the most consequential figures in fashion for the past four decades. Which is why it felt right that the Metropolitan Museum in New York should announce it would be holding a show of his work, and why it felt wrong when they pulled the show earlier this week.  Galliano's star burned brightly until early 2011, when over the course of two months or so he came apart. There was a damning video of him in a Paris café, hissing at a woman about her “ugly Jewish face” and later telling a man he was a “f-king Asian bastard” he would kill.

Tuesday

Anne de Courcy

Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze

This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed illustrations, patterns of fabric and family photographs, interspersed with chunks of prose or aphorisms. In short, it is an expression of its author’s philosophy, threaded through rather disjointedly with the story of her life. Iris Apfel is the only woman I can think of – with the possible exceptions of Diana Vreeland and Helena Rubinstein – who turned extreme plainness into an aspect of personal style.