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How the Galliano Show at the Met Fell Apart

 

How the Galliano Show at the Met Fell Apart

 

Anna Wintour put her full power and prestige behind a designer convicted of an antisemitic hate crime. Behind the scenes, influential New Yorkers revolted.

 

By Jacob BernsteinVanessa Friedman and Dana Rubinstein

Sept. 2, 2026

Updated 3:05 p.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/style/john-galliano-met-exhibition-cancel-anna-wintour.html

 

Early last month, Anna Wintour, the global editorial director of Vogue and powerful Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee, reached out to Julie Menin, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and the first Jewish speaker of the New York City Council.

 

Over a 30-minute video call, Wintour tried to persuade Menin that honoring John Galliano, the fashion designer convicted of an antisemitic hate crime, with a solo exhibition in the Met’s Costume Institute was a good idea.

 

Galliano is a creative genius, Wintour said, according to Menin. And he is contrite about his previous rants against Jews — which included an exclamation of “I love Hitler!” and a taunting of patrons at a bar that their forefathers would all be “gassed.”

 

During the call, Wintour, who rules over the fashion world and the Met Gala with almost unquestioned authority, offered to have Galliano meet privately with Menin. She also, according to Wintour’s spokeswoman, discussed possible ways to mollify critics of the show, such as moving the date of the gala, changing its focus and opening the exhibition early for Jewish leaders.

 

Menin left the call feeling brushed off. Wintour had continued to exude confidence that the exhibition would be a success.

 

On Monday, that confidence collapsed, as the Met abruptly announced that the show was off.

 

The implosion of the most important event on the museum’s calendar, with its star-studded extravaganza that draws luminaries from the worlds of entertainment, art and industry and generates tens of millions of dollars each year, was a striking stumble for the 76-year-old Wintour, who has personally championed Galliano and prides herself on her unerring judgment and her astute assessment of art and fashion.

 

Wintour’s effort to elevate Galliano by bestowing on him the Costume Institute’s highest honor — only two living fashion designers have previously been celebrated with solo shows — touched off a tense drama that played out among New York’s powerful and prominent as they scattered to their vacations during a typically quiet stretch of August.

 

By pushing ahead with the plan, Wintour and other Met leaders appeared to misread some essential realities of the moment: The fashion world’s forgiving and commercially driven values do not often reflect broader public sentiment. The Met leaders, many of them non-Jewish, seemed out of touch with the raw feelings of the city’s Jewish residents, who had witnessed searing incidents of antisemitism over the summer. And even the extraordinary ability of Wintour to sweep away scandal, criticism and controversies through sheer will and decisiveness has its limits.

 

“It was a perfect storm of unnecessary insensitivity,” said Rabbi David Ingber, senior director of Jewish life and senior director of the Bronfman Center at the 92nd Street Y.

 

In a statement, a museum spokeswoman said of the Galliano show, “Like every Met exhibition, it proceeded through the museum’s established processes of curatorial development and institutional review, including with certain board groups.

 

But the blunder has touched off many hard questions about Wintour’s, and the Met’s, judgment.

 

Said Elisha Wiesel, chairman of the Elie Wiesel Foundation: “If praise for Hitler and references to the gas chamber do not disqualify someone, where is the line?”

 

Growing Concerns

At first, the museum’s leadership team seemed confident that the public would want to see the exhibition, despite Galliano’s past misdeeds. Fifteen years had gone by since he was found guilty by a French court of the hate crime.

 

After his conviction, Galliano went into rehab and apologized for his remarks against both Jews and Asians. He met with Jewish leaders and studied the history of Judaism under rabbis. Wintour supported him when he was persona non grata, and helped him become the creative director of a prestigious luxury brand, Maison Margiela, where his tenure was widely applauded until his departure in 2024.

 

As far as the fashion world was concerned, Galliano was back, reputation restored, and the Met had good reason to believe the show celebrating the 65-year-old designer would be a hit: Five of the 10 most-visited exhibitions in modern museum history have been Costume Institute shows, and over the years, Wintour has transformed the Met Gala from just another stuffy benefit into a spectacle akin to the Super Bowl or the Oscars. Since 1999, when she took over the event, it has brought in over $300 million for the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion wing, including a record $42 million in 2026. Overall, Wintour has raised more than $500 million for the museum.

 

But even in late July, after The New York Times broke the news of the planned Galliano exhibition, there were early murmurs of opposition. Some of them emanated from members of the nearly 100-person Met board, who had long tolerated Wintour’s imperious manner, from her habit of wearing sunglasses at board meetings to her neglecting to invite many of them to the gala. They had stayed quiet in the past, even as they chafed at the increasingly carnival-like atmosphere she created, from the arrival of the Kardashians at the gala to ever more outrageous clothes on display.

 

Some prominent Jews, meanwhile, were unsettled by the news, but worried that if they spoke out, they would play into stereotypes.

 

“People didn’t want to seem like they were complaining,” said Alice Tisch, whose extended family has donated millions to the Met. “One of the trustees I talked to said, ‘I think they’ll take it out more on the Jews.’”

 

As a result, many people who disagreed with the plan hoped to work quietly toward a resolution, especially as both Wintour and Galliano assured them Galliano’s bigoted behavior was firmly in the past.

 

But then doubts about that claim surfaced.

 

Early in August, a Facebook post written by fashion publicist Lauren London began to ricochet around industry circles about a more recent event allegedly involving Galliano. London described an encounter she said she had with the designer in 2019 at the luxury Henri Chenot spa, an alcohol-free wellness retreat in Italy. She wrote that her friend had been speaking in Hebrew on her cellphone, when Galliano overheard her and began screaming, “Merry Christmas!”

 

“When my friend asked him if he had a problem with Hebrew he promptly and very unapologetically responded that he did,” London wrote in the post. “She then told him that she had a lot of his clothes and when she got back to her home in Israel she would dispose of them. He told her to please do.”

 

Still, even as the Facebook post gained traction, allies of Wintour were unmoved.

 

“I have no opinion about Facebook posts,” said Andrew Solomon, a member of the Met’s executive committee who spoke to The Times after the post surfaced last month. “I think they’re frequently made up, or exaggerated, or incoherent, and I have no idea what the truth is or is not behind that.”

 

Galliano later denied through a spokesman that the incident at the spa took place. But London’s friend who made the call, and her daughter, backed up her account.

 

Around the same time London wrote her post, Arne Glimcher, an art world titan, sent an email to David Breslin, a Met curator, and Max Hollein, who as the Met’s director had given final approval to the Galliano exhibition.

 

“I don’t think you have considered the cost of this action and its reverberations to come,” Glimcher wrote. He added that he and his wife were “seriously reconsidering other works that have been earmarked from our collection to the Met in our wills.”

 

It is not clear how Hollein responded, but his ties to Wintour were deep. And, as far as he understood, the museum had taken steps to head off just this kind of negative reaction. In the spring, Wintour and Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute, had arranged private meetings between Galliano and Jewish leaders. Most of those leaders came away saying they found him remorseful for his past actions. They were also assured that the exhibition would deal frankly with his hateful statements.

 

The Jewish leaders made their support public when the show was announced. But the full board of the Met was never consulted, leaving many feeling that there had not been sufficient deliberation about the appropriateness of the museum’s choice.

 

“I thought it was insane,” Tisch said.

 

Climate of Fear

On Aug. 14, a man entered Central Synagogue in Manhattan and attacked a congregant and a security guard during Shabbat services, rattling the city. The violence hit especially hard for many of the museum’s benefactors, who are congregants there. And it occurred as hate crime against Jews in New York continued to rise, representing the majority of all such crimes in the city.

 

Those already jolted by the Met’s decision to honor Galliano began to worry that the exhibit would serve to normalize antisemitism inside one of New York’s most hallowed spaces.

 

No longer was the fashion discussion occurring in a vacuum, but in an increasingly tense New York. As the days ticked by, city officials including Menin and City Comptroller Mark Levine, were growing fed up with the Met leaders’ failure to respond to their concerns. On Aug. 26, Menin wrote a letter of protest, on official city stationery.

 

“Our cultural institutions, particularly those that receive funding from the City of New York, have a responsibility to demonstrate that hatred and bigotry carry consequences,” Menin wrote to Wintour, Hollein and Bolton.

 

Two days later, Tisch fired off a message of her own to Hollein. In it, she described the plan for the exhibit as a “whitewash” of a “known” antisemite.

 

The exhibition, she went on to say, “bespeaks a failure of governance as it seems you are unduly influenced and directed by a corporate donor and commercial enterprise, and mining it all for financial gain.”

 

When Tisch didn’t hear back, she forwarded her email to people she knew on the board: Samantha Boardman, Daniel Brodsky, Dasha Zhukova Niarchos, Blair Effron — “anyone whose email address I happened to have,” she recalled.

 

(Board members interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity, because the museum’s leadership has been reprimanding trustees for sharing their concerns with the news media.)

 

On Friday, The Times published an article describing the intensifying backlash. Social media lit up with more criticism. A sense of crisis took hold inside the Met, even as the show’s key players were scattered around the globe — Hollein in his native Austria, Bolton in Lake Como, Galliano in his Paris studio.

 

The Met called an executive committee meeting for 8 a.m. on Monday, with a video conference of the entire board scheduled for 4 p.m.

 

But before they even met, Hollein, Bolton and Wintour agreed to a plan with Galliano: He would say publicly that he had asked the museum to suspend plans for the show.

 

At 8:45 a.m. Monday, he put out a statement on social media: “After much reflection and discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” he wrote.

 

“I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he continued. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.”

 

Almost 100,000 comments poured in, many praising Galliano and calling the outcome unfair, others denouncing the Met and Wintour for abandoning the show.

 

Back in New York, recriminations began. The afternoon meeting of the full Met board took place as scheduled over Zoom. It began with board leadership scolding members for talking to the news media, according to participants. When other members asked why they had not been consulted early on, they were told that the full board could not be included on every decision.

 

Hollein spoke of Galliano’s talent and the Met’s decision-making process. Wintour, who was also present on the video call, remained silent.

 

But that day, Vogue published an article about the canceled exhibition. The story did not detail the concerns about antisemitism, but it said the plan to honor Galliano had been met with “mixed reactions.”

 

Quoted in the article, Wintour praised Galliano as “the premiere couturier of his generation.” She also described the show not as canceled, but only “postponed.”

 

Jacob Bernstein reports on power and privilege for the Style section of The Times.

 

Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.

 

Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.

Quadrophenia (1979): 10 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets You Never Knew

 

The new Purdey season is here.

 

A Gentleman's London, Episode Twelve: Purdey

https://www.purdey.com/

 

James Purdey & Sons, or simply Purdey, is a British gunmaker based in London, England specialising in high-end bespoke sporting shotguns and rifles.[1][2] Purdey holds Royal Warrants of appointment as gun and rifle makers to the British and other European royal families.

 

History

 

James Purdey & Sons Ltd. in Audley House on South Audley Street, in London's Mayfair

 

Four-barreled pistol of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 4th Duke of Newcastle made by James Purdey

James Purdey was born in Whitechapel in 1784, and apprenticed to his brother-in-law, Thomas Keck Hutchinson. After completing his training, he worked for both Joseph Manton and Rev. Alexander Forsyth, before establishing his own company in London, England, in 1814, locating his business on Princes Street, now Wardour Street, near Leicester Square.

 

In 1826, the company moved from Princes Street to Manton's former premises at 314-315 Oxford Street. Due to a conflict of numbering, the business used the address ‘314½ Oxford Street’ from 1827.  Due to a conflict of numbering, the business used the address ‘314½ Oxford Street’ from 1827. 

 

The founder's son, James Purdey the Younger, took over the company's running from his father in 1858. James the Younger saw rapid change in the development and design of guns and rifles during his lifetime, essentially moving from muzzle loading flintlocks in the 1820s to breech loading hammerless ejectors by the 1890s. James the Younger was always at the forefront of advances in designing and building his guns and rifles and took out several patents for technical innovations over the years. These included the famous ‘Purdey Bolts’ locking system, and his concealed third bite. Both remain in production today, and may other gunmakers also adopted these designs as well.

 

In 1878 James the Younger took two of his sons into the business, renaming it James Purdey & Sons. In 1882, the company moved from Oxford Street to new premises at 57-58 South Audley Street, on the corner with Mount Street, where the company remains today. James the Younger designed this building to accommodate his showroom and the factory, and later, the building provided living quarters for James' family. The City of Westminster unveiled a memorial plaque on the shop at 57-60 South Audley Street on 30 April 1992.

 

Purdey introduced their self-opening hammerless gun in 1880. Designed by Frederick Beesley, a former Purdey craftsman, his hammerless self-opening mechanism uses one limb of a V-spring to operate the internal hammers and the other to operate the self-opening feature. This action was modified in 1888 through the incorporation of William Wem’s ejector design. Apart from occasional refinement and the optional single trigger mechanism, very little change has subsequently been made to the design of the side-by-side gun.

 

In 1900, Athol Purdey took over from his father and ran the business through the prosperous Edwardian years, as well as supervising Purdey's manufacturing of sniper rifles and aerial gunnery sights for the War Office during World War I. Athol's sons, James and Tom, both of whom had served in France, joined the firm in the 1920s.

Harry And Meghan’s Return Puts Pressure On William And Kate | Jack Royston /Anniversary of Diana’s death comes just days after Harry and Meghan’s return to UK

Anniversary of Diana’s death comes just days after Harry and Meghan’s return to UK

The anniversary comes weeks before Charles Spencer prepares to release his memoir to counter ‘untruths’ about Diana

Press Association Reporters

Sunday 30 August 2026 08:37 BST

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/prince-harry-dianna-death-anniversary-b3041699.html

 

File photo dated 06/09/97 of (Left to right) Earl Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry and King Charles III, the then Prince of Wales, waiting as the hearse carrying the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales prepares to leave Westminster Abbey following her funeral service. The 29th anniversary of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death falls on Monday, just days after her youngest son the Duke of Sussex returned home with his family to live in the UK. Issue date: Sunday August 30, 2026. (PA)

Bottom of Form

Monday marks 29 years since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The dat falls just days after her youngest son the Duke of Sussex returned to live in the UK with his family.

Six years after the Megxit crisis, Harry and the Duchess of Sussex have relocated from California with Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.

During a brief summer stay, Harry took both children, now enrolled in British schools, to visit Diana’s resting place for the first time.

The princess rests on a small island in the Round Oval Lake at Northamptonshire’s Althorp estate, the Spencers ancestral home now cared for by her brother Earl Spencer.

Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the princess’s sudden death following a car crash in Paris.

Harry revealed over the summer that he bakes a lemon drizzle cake annually to mark the date as a "sweet" way to remember his mother.

Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris car crash in 1997 (John Stillwell/PA)

Diana – the ex-wife of the now-King – was tragically killed on August 31 1997 when her sons Princes Harry and William were just 12 and 15.

The anniversary comes just three weeks before Charles Spencer prepares to release his deeply personal memoir to counter “untruths” about her life.

Earl Spencer, Prince William, Prince Harry and the then-Prince of Wales on the day of Diana’s funeral (Fiona Hanson/PA)

His new book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister is due out on September 22 and is set to contain “many revelations that will draw considerable attention”, according to its publisher.

The earl famously delivered a passionate eulogy at her funeral, pledging the princess’ “blood family” would protect William and Harry “so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned”.

He said of writing the memoir: “With the 30th anniversary of Diana’s tragic death on the skyline, I’ve been inundated yet again with requests for interviews about my sister.

“This has convinced me to write down my own thoughts and memories, once and for all, rather than having the discomfort of again reading the opinions of others, many of which are based on untruths that have become accepted over time.”

Earl Spencer delivers his eulogy at Diana’s funeral in Westminster Abbey (John Stillwell/PA)

Daniel Bunyard, publishing director at Penguin Random House UK, said: “While these pages contain many revelations that will draw considerable attention, readers will find, for the first time, but also for all time, a fitting tribute to the beloved woman who was Princess Diana.”

Devoted fans of the princess usually gather each year at the gates of her former London home Kensington Palace to leave flowers and other tributes.

In the Palace’s Sunken Garden stands the bronze statue of Diana commissioned by the now-Prince of Wales and Harry, and unveiled by the estranged brothers together in 2021.

The then-Duke of Cambridge and Duke of Sussex look at the statue they commissioned of their mother in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace in 2021 (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The pair put on a united front despite their rift to reveal the sculpture on what would have been their mother’s 60th birthday.

Their fallout stretches back to before Harry’s 2018 wedding to American-born former Suits actress Meghan.

The duke was apparently angered at what he perceived to be his brother’s “snobbish” attitude towards his bride, after William questioned whether he should rush into things.

William and Harry speak to the crowd at Wembley Stadium during the Concert for Diana in 2007 (Stephen Hird/PA)

But their relationship deteriorated further during Megxit and after Harry’s accusations against William and other family members in his Oprah interview, Netflix documentary and memoir Spare.

William and the Princess of Wales have yet to comment on Harry and Meghan’s return.

In 2007, William and Harry commemorated 10 years since their mother’s death together, staging a pop concert at Wembley on what would have been her 46th birthday, and an emotional memorial service in London on the actual anniversary.

William leaves flowers as he and Harry look at tributes to Diana, Princess of Wales attached to gates of Kensington Palace ahead of the 20th anniversary in 2017

The day before the 20th anniversary in 2017, the siblings were side by side as they viewed tributes left for the princess outside Kensington Palace.

The brothers will be expected to mark this year’s anniversary separately, with a reunion on the 30th anniversary looking, at this stage, unlikely.

 

14 Sep 2014: Top Portuguese academic decries 'filthy' English

 Top Portuguese academic decries 'filthy' English A best-selling book penned by a Portuguese don has excoriated the English for being 'promiscuous, dirty and drunken'/ The Telegraph.

 

Top Portuguese academic decries 'filthy' English

A best-selling book penned by a Portuguese don has excoriated the English for being 'promiscuous, dirty and drunken'

 

 

By Gregory Walton

11:04AM BST 14 Sep 2014 / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/11095057/PICS-PLEASE-Top-Portuguese-academic-decries-filthy-English.html

 

As a love-letter to an adopted country goes, Portuguese academic João Magueijo's to Britain is perhaps somewhat lacking in love.

 

The Imperial College physics professor slams England for being one of the 'most rotten societies in the world' in a 188 page diatribe in which he describes his hosts as 'violent animals'.

 

The dapper academic, 47, wrote Bifes Mal Pasados (Undercooked Beef) as a response to what he describes as 'pathologically violent' English culture.

 

According to Magueijo, the English are "always fighting. I never met such a group of animals. English culture is pathologically violent. The English are unrestrained wild beasts and are totally out of control."

 

The controversial book, so far only published in Portuguese, is illustrated with a photograph of a feckless looking toff in front of the Elizabeth Tower, complete with bowler hat and pocket watch.

Magueijo also takes umbrage with Britain's drinking culture.

 

"It is not unusual to drink 12 pints, or two huge buckets of beer, per person," he writes.

 

"Even a horse would get drunk with this but in England it is standard practice.

 

"In England real men have to drink like sponges, eat like skeletons and throw up everything at the end of the evening."

 

The Imperial scientist, does not just reserve his ire for Britain's young men.

 

Magueijo relates an episode from his time as a don at the University of Cambridge in which a female student vomited during a formal dinner and continued eating, drinking and 'shouting nonsense as if nothing had happened'.

 

Students, perhaps usurprisingly, are the focus of much of the Iberian's scorn.

 

The book, which is dedicated to the Queen, goes on to chronicle his experiences of students' halls.

 

"When you visit English homes, or the toilets at schools or in student lodgings, they are all so disgusting that even my grandmother's poultry cage is cleaner," he writes.

 

Responding to suggestions of a backlash from his hosts, Magueijo said he is confident that British people would be able to laugh off his criticisms.

 

"I do not fear any backlash. I trust the British sense of humour," he said, insisting to the Sunday Times that he loves British "tolerance, the creativity, the madness of the people. I'd had so many awful experiences attempting to have holidays in the UK that I thought they could serve as a good narrative backbone, Fawlty Towers-style."

 

The book has sold 20,000 copies - no mean feat in a country of just 10 million - but there are no plans for an English edition.

 

Paramedics look after a person at a temporary field hospital near London's Liverpool Street Photo: AP

 

Bestseller reveals don’s life with ‘filthy’ English

Paulo Anunciacao and David Harrison Published: 14 September 2014 /Sunday Times /

 

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1459179.ece

 

 

 

A BOOK written by a Portuguese academic based in London that portrays the English as “violent animals” and accuses them of being drunk, dirty and sexually promiscuous has become an unlikely bestseller in his home country.

 

Joao Magueijo, a physics professor at Imperial College London who spent seven years as a fellow at Cambridge, writes that England has “one of the most rotten societies in Europe, possibly the world”.

 

In Bifes Mal Passados (Undercooked Beef), written in Portuguese, Magueijo, 47, ridicules English life from eating habits to personal hygiene and sexual behaviour.

 

The English are “always fighting”, he writes, in one of many generalisations. “I never met such a group of animals. English culture is pathologically violent. The English are unrestrained wild beasts and totally out of control.”

The Teddy Boys: Britain's First Teenage Gang

The Teddy Boys or Teds were a mainly British youth subculture originating in the early 1950s to mid-1960s and then revived in the 1970s who were interested in rock and roll and R&B music, wearing clothes partly inspired by the styles worn by dandies in the Edwardian period, which Savile Row tailors had attempted to reintroduce in Britain after the Second World War.

 

A mainly British phenomenon, the Teddy Boy subculture started among teenagers in London in the early 1950s, and rapidly spread across the UK, becoming strongly associated with American rock and roll music. After World War II, male youths in delinquent gangs who had adopted Edwardian-era fashion were sometimes known as Cosh Boys, or Edwardians. The name Teddy Boy came into official use when a 23 September 1953 Daily Express newspaper article shortened Edwardian to Teddy (which can be a diminutive form of either Edward or Theodore) The term had previously been used in Edwardian Britain to refer to members of the Territorial Army (see for example The Swoop! written by P. G. Wodehouse in 1909). This was a reference to the king, Edward VII, in whose service they were.

 

In post-war Britain, rationing continued to affect the fashion industry until it ended in 1949 and men's tailors in central London devised a style based on Edwardian clothing hoping to sell to young officers being demobilized from the services. However, the style—featuring tapered trousers, long jackets similar to post-war American zoot suits, and fancy waistcoats—was not popular with its target market, leaving tailors with piles of unsold clothing which, to recoup losses, were sold cheaply to menswear shops elsewhere in London. While there had been some affluent adoption—"an extravagant upper-class snub to the post-war Labour Government and its message of austerity"—it was predominantly suburban working-class youth who adopted and adapted the look ("spiv" and cosh boy associations also hastened its middle-class rejection) and, around 1952, what became the "Teddy Boy" style began to emerge, gradually spreading across Britain. The 1953 film Cosh Boy (US: The Slasher), written by Lewis Gilbert and Vernon Harris, makes an early reference to the style when the character, Roy (James Kenny), speaks the words "[it's a] drape...the latest cut".

 

Although there had been youth groups with their own dress codes called scuttlers in 19th-century Liverpool and Manchester,[8] Teddy Boys were the first youth group in Britain to differentiate themselves as teenagers, helping create a youth market. The 1955 US film Blackboard Jungle marked a watershed in the United Kingdom. When shown in an Elephant and Castle cinema, south London in 1956, the teenage Teddy Boy audience began to riot, tearing up seats and dancing in the cinema's aisles.[9] After that, other riots took place around the country where the film was shown.

 

Some Teds formed gangs and gained notoriety following violent clashes with rival youth gangs as well as unprovoked attacks on immigrants. The most notable clashes were the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, in which Teddy Boys were present in large numbers and were implicated in attacks on the Caribbean community. According to reports released decades after the riots, "Teddy Boys armed with iron bars, butcher's knives and weighted leather belts" participated in mobs "300- to 400-strong" that targeted black residents, in one night alone leaving "five black men lying unconscious on the pavements of Notting Hill."Teds were also implicated in the clashes of the 1958 St Ann's riots in Nottingham.

 

The violent lifestyle was sensationalised in the pulp novel Teddy Boy by Ernest Ryman, first published in the UK in 1958.

 

Style

Teddy Boy clothing included drape jackets reminiscent of 1940s American zoot suits worn by members of Italian-American, Chicano and African-American communities (such as Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan), usually in dark shades, sometimes with a velvet trim collar and pocket flaps, and high-waist "drainpipe" trousers, often exposing the socks. The outfit also included a high-necked loose-collared white shirt (known as a Mr. B. collar, because it was often worn by jazz musician Billy Eckstine); a narrow "Slim Jim" tie or western bolo tie, and a brocade waistcoat. The clothes were mostly tailor-made at great expense, and paid through weekly installments.

 

Favoured footwear included highly polished Oxfords, chunky brogues, and crepe-soled shoes, often suede (known as brothel creepers or beetle crushers). Preferred hairstyles included long, strongly moulded greased-up hair with a quiff at the front and the side combed back to form a duck's arse at the rear. Another style was the "Boston", in which the hair was greased straight back and cut square across at the nape.

 

Teddy Girls

Teddy Girls (also called Judies) wore drape jackets, pencil skirts, hobble skirts, long plaits, rolled-up jeans, flat shoes, tailored jackets with velvet collars, straw boater hats, cameo brooches, espadrilles, coolie hats and long, elegant clutch bags. Later, they adopted the American fashions of toreador trousers, voluminous circle skirts, and hair in ponytails.

 

The Teddy Girls' clothing choices were not strictly for aesthetic effect; the girls were collectively rejecting post-war austerity. They were young working-class women from the poorer districts of London who would typically leave school at the age of 14 or 15 to work in factories or offices. Teddy Girls spent much of their free time buying or making their trademark clothes. Their style originated from a head-turning, fastidious style from the fashion houses, which had launched haute-couture clothing lines recalling the Edwardian era. "It was our fashion and we made it up," declared one "Judie", succinctly writing the mantra of the Teddy Girl ethos.

 

The style was documented by Ken Russell in a June 1955 series of Picture Post photographs titled "Teddy Girls". Russell noted that the female counterpart of the Teddy Boy subculture was overlooked, saying: "No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys."

 

Music and dancing

Although Teddy Boys became associated with rock and roll music, prior to the advent of that genre, Teddy Boys also listened and danced to jump blues, R&B, jazz and skiffle music. A well-known dance that the Teddy Boys adopted was The Creep, a slow shuffle that was so popular with Teddy Boys that it led to their other nickname, Creepers. The song "The Creep" came out in 1953 and was written and recorded for HMV by Yorkshire-born big band leader and saxophonist Ken Mackintosh. Although this was not a rock and roll record, it was widely taken on by the Teddy Boys of the time. From 1955, rock and roll was adopted by the Teddy Boys when the film Blackboard Jungle was first shown in UK cinemas, and Teddy Boys started listening to artists including Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran.

 

Although not as big as the Americans, British rock and roll artists such as Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Cliff Richard, Dickie Pride, and Joe Brown became popular with the Teddy Boy culture, as did the Merseybeat scene in the early 60s. The Beatles' George Harrison and John Lennon emulated the Teddy Boy style in the early formation of the band. Original British rock stars such as Billy Fury also moved to the latest of rock and roll, such as beat music during the early 1960s.

 

Revivals

Following The London Rock and Roll Show held at Wembley Stadium in August 1972 (featuring American performers including Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Bill Haley, plus UK-based support acts), the music enjoyed a renewed period of popularity. Musical momentum was maintained by the release of films such as American Graffiti and That'll Be the Day (both 1973) and glam rock reworkings by bands such as Wizzard, The Glitter Band, Mud and Showaddywaddy topping the pop charts from 1973.

 

Concurrently, a resurgence of interest in Teddy Boy fashions was promoted by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren through their shop Let it Rock, on London's King's Road. The new generation of Teds adopted some aspects of the 1950s but with a large glam rock influence, including louder colours for drape jackets, brothel creepers, and socks and shiny satin shirts worn with bootlace ties, jeans and big-buckled belts. The 1970s Teddy Boys often sported flamboyant pompadour hairstyles in addition to long sideburns, and they added hairspray to grease/pomade to style their hair. In the late 1970s, the new generation became the enemies of the Westwood and Sex Pistols-inspired punks. In the spring of 1977, street battles between young punks and teds happened on London's King's Road, where the earliest new-wave shops, including Westwood and McLaren's Sex (which were by then no longer selling zoot suits and ted gear), were situated.

 

In the late 1980s, there was a move by a number of Teddy Boys to revive the 1950s Teddy Boy style. In the early 1990s, a group of Teddy Boy revivalists in the Tottenham area of north London formed "The Edwardian Drape Society" (T.E.D.S.). The group concentrated on reclaiming the style which they felt had become bastardised by pop/glam rock bands such as Showaddywaddy and Mud in the 1970s.

The English Gentleman at the Cabinet War Rooms - January 2014

 

44 KEY Differences Between RIPLEY (2024) and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999)

 

Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar is a 1995 book by distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell that explores the history and social ethos of men's lawn tennis.

Sociologist and historian E. Digby Baltzell

Sporting Gentlemen

by E. Digby Baltzell (Author)  Format: Paperback

Tennis is a high-stakes game, played by prodigies identified early and coached by professionals in hopes of high rankings and endorsements. This commercial world is far removed from the origins of the sport. Before 1968―when Wimbledon invited professional players to compete for the first time―tennis was part of a sportsmanship tradition that emphasized character over money. It produced well-rounded gentlemen who expressed a code of honor, not commerce.

 

In this authoritative and affectionate history of men's tennis, distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell recovers the glory of the age. From its aristocratic origins in the late ninteenth century, to the Tilden years, and through a succession of newcomers, the amateur era and its virtues survived a century of democratization and conflict. Sporting Gentlemen examines the greatest players and matches in the history of tennis. Baltzell explores the tennis code of honor and its roots in the cricket code of the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American upper class.

 

This code of honor remained in spite of the later democratization of tennis. Thus, the court manners of the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers at the Old Wimbledon were upheld to the letter by Don Budge and Jack Kramer as well as Rod Laver, John Newcombe, and Arthur Ashe. Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money. For all who love the game of tennis, Sporting Gentlemen is both fascinating history and a badly needed analysis of what has made the sport great.

Sporting Gentlemen: Men’s Tennis from the Age of Honor to the Cult of the Superstar is a 1995 book by distinguished sociologist E. Digby Baltzell that explores the history and social ethos of men's lawn tennis.

Core Themes and Overview

• The Code of Honor: Baltzell traces the roots of tennis etiquette back to the gentlemanly cricket code of the late-19th-century Anglo-American upper class.
• Amateur Era: The book highlights how traditional court manners survived through generations of players, from early figures like the Renshaw twins and Doherty brothers to later greats like Don Budge, Jack Kramer, Rod Laver, and Arthur Ashe.
• The Open Era Critique: The final chapter delivers a critical look at modern professional tennis, arguing that commercialization and the "cult of the superstar" replaced traditional values with monetary class distinctions.

As described on Amazon, “Baltzell's final chapter on the Open Era is a blistering attack on the decline of honor and the obliteration of class distinctions, leaving only those based on money.”

 

Barbarians on the Court

 

By Stephen G. Smith

July 9, 1995

Barbarians on the Court

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/09/books/barbarians-on-the-court.html?eafs_enabled=false

July 9, 1995, Section 7, Page 11Buy Reprints

 

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

 

IN late August 1881, 25 gentlemen traveled to Rhode Island to compete in the first official lawn tennis championship of the United States. It was played at the Newport Casino, a graceful tennis complex designed by Stanford White, on Bellevue Avenue, the main strand of high society's summer capital. The players, mostly undergraduates at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Penn, wore trousers or knickers and long-sleeved shirts, with belts, hats and stockings bearing their club colors. For the next three decades, E. Digby Baltzell writes in "Sporting Gentlemen," the cricket-club aristocracy dominated the championships much as television does today. Play was limited to the morning hours so as not to interfere with other leisure activities; crowds were kept to 3,000, with the best seats reserved for Mrs. Astor's 400 and old-line families from Philadelphia and Boston.

 

But tennis was quickly outgrowing the cozy and complacent confines of exclusive clubs along the Eastern Seaboard and in England. By 1914, the talk of tennis was the Davis Cup, which was being contested by six nations. In what turned out to be a pivotal moment in the history of the game, the challenge round was played at Forest Hills, the new home of the West Side Tennis Club in New York. On the final day of the match between the United States and Australia, the stadium was packed with more than 12,000 cheering spectators. Their boisterous enthusiasm turned to pandemonium when Norman Brookes of Australia dropped his racquet and stuck a finger in each ear. Bottles were thrown from the stands and fans spilled onto the court, with policemen in pursuit. Tennis had been emphatically democratized. The next year the United States championships were moved from Newport to Forest Hills, and the game began an evolution that would culminate, in 1968, in the opening of the major tournaments to professionals.

 

Mr. Baltzell and Peter Bodo both view the changes with regret. In "The Courts of Babylon," Mr. Bodo, a senior writer at Tennis magazine, finds that a "new barbarism" has taken hold of the tour, reducing players from "gentlemen to jerks." Mr. Baltzell, an emeritus professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a well-known chronicler of the WASP aristocracy, longs for the dreamy days when players used wooden racquets, hit white balls and behaved like gentlemen. In his new work of "historical sociology," he sees the ruination of tennis as a portentous social metaphor. "As I write, in our increasingly classless and bureaucratic world, the gentleman's descendants in America and England have abdicated authority, not only over their wives and children but also over their nations and the world," he declares.

 

Mr. Bodo has obviously spent a good deal of time talking with Mr. Baltzell and calls him "the single most important influence on my interpretation of the game." But where the professor brims with intellectual confidence, the journalist is somewhat self-conscious about his pronouncements. "An opinion can be a terrible thing to have," Mr. Bodo writes at the end of his author's note. He spends the rest of the book testing this proposition, with a resulting mixture of genuine insight and inadvertent hilarity. As he writes of Mr. Baltzell: "The sociology of the professional game comes to life like a 3-D comic book when you look through his magic glasses."

 

When Mr. Bodo puts on the magic glasses of sociology himself, he tends to go completely over the top. "New York is full of flesh-eaters," he writes. "It's a thumbs-up, thumbs-down kind of town. Start spreading the news, but watch your back. The dude's got a Glock." Or: "Show me a true Parisian, and I'll show you a man whose veins are clogged with cholesterol sludge and whose heart harbors a secret passion for the accordion. I'll show you a woman who's got a little thing for Rodney Dangerfield. Don't ask why, c'est la vie." Mr. Bodo becomes even more expansive when he strays into psychology. He strolls telepathically through the mind of Gloria Connors as she watches her son Jimmy play: "Perhaps she was entranced by Jimbo's status as an Oedipal avenger come to life, a raging, mother-loving, foulmouthed son who unabashedly, even gleefully, fondled himself like an infant in front of his mother." Hunter S. Thompson never strung his racquet any tighter than Peter Bodo.

 

Mr. Bodo draws freely on the two decades he has spent covering tennis, and he is at his best when analyzing styles of play or relating an anecdote that never made it into the newspapers. He produces a haunting portrait of Bjorn Borg after conducting a routine interview at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan in 1978. The blinds in the lavish suite were drawn tight; the coffee table was littered with half-eaten fruit and dirty dishes; Borg was wearing a track suit that looked slept in; his face was unwashed and his hair hung in oily strands. On impulse Mr. Bodo asked the champion what he thought of Howard Hughes. "I don't know him," Borg replied. "He has a lot of money, huh? Anyway, he seems like a nice guy."

 

Having watched thousands of matches, Mr. Bodo writes not just with an expert's eye but with a finely tuned ear, as in this observation on John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl: "If you closed your eyes during a match between McEnroe and Lendl, it was easy to tell which man occupied either side of the court. McEnroe's footfalls were as silent as those of a cat, while Lendl made an astonishing amount of noise -- as if he were moving furniture."

 

Sizing up Chris Evert's success, Mr. Bodo makes clear that her metronomic stroking and "Ice Maiden" demeanor were only partly responsible. A key ingredient was her unique sense of where she was and where she had to be: "She sure made the court look small." Steffi Graf's "big secret," Mr. Bodo writes, "was that she couldn't play tennis," at least not in the technical sense. But her superior athletic ability and raw power more than compensated for a bad hitch in her serving motion and a defensive underspin backhand -- until the arrival of Monica Seles, "who used two hands off both wings to hit remarkably flat, hard, accurate strokes." Rivals hoped that "as Seles matured she would develop wide hips, substantial thighs and enough height and bulk to cause her problems." Instead, she grew to a well-proportioned 5 foot 9 and reeled off seven victories in ten Grand Slams between 1990 and April 1993, when she was stabbed in the back by a deranged fan wielding a nine-inch-long boning knife. The psychological damage caused by the attack has kept her off the court -- and prevented her from becoming what many experts thought she would be, the greatest woman player ever.

 

MR. BODO loses his way when he writes about the lives of women players off the tennis court. He asserts that the "degeneration and corruption" of the women's tour "has been the most underreported story in tennis in our time," and he sets out to rectify this oversight with three chapters irritatingly titled "The Gals of Babylon." He writes: " 'Now' is a crisis point in women's pro tennis, and now is about stabbings, child abuse, teen-age drug abuse and a shocking rate of attrition." On no fewer than three occasions he says that many or most of the top women players are lesbians. His proofs are few and far between. Andrea Jaeger serves as a flimsy buttress for several of his sensational assertions: she was a teen-age wonder who flamed out early; she "took to carrying a switchblade" ("I didn't even mind," Mr. Bodo says. "Shoot, I was 18 once, too"); and she was supposedly encouraged by her fellow players to embark on a lesbian relationship. Mr. Bodo recounts the familiar story of Jennifer Capriati's sad decline and drug bust. And he does the standard recitation of Martina Navratilova's lesbian lovers. (News flash: Judy Nelson demanded visitation privileges with Navratilova's dogs after the two women split up.) Mr. Bodo's sense of outrage is unconvincing until he comes to the subject of "tennis dads." These sorry creatures, many of them failed athletes, strut in the reflected glory of their teen-age daughters and often sponge off them as well. They can be aggressively exploitative (Stefano Capriati), feckless (Peter Graf) or abusive and potentially dangerous (Jim Pierce).

 

MR. BODO and Mr. Baltzell agree that most of the problems in tennis today can be traced to the amount of money sloshing around the game. Winning a singles title at Wimbledon is worth more than $500,000 -- which, Mr. Bodo reports, is roughly what Pete Sampras was guaranteed for merely showing up at a tournament in oil-rich Qatar, where he promptly lost his first-round match to somebody named Kareem Alami. In financial terms, playing tennis is something players do to get endorsements. As Mr. Bodo points out, Andre Agassi was earning $1 million a month in endorsements before he ever won a Grand Slam event. Small wonder, then, that players sign "patch deals" that make them look, in Mr. Bodo's words, like "a stock car plastered with sponsor logos."

 

Whatever remained of the amateur ideal disappeared on Aug. 30, 1979, in a match at Flushing Meadow, a venue that could be mistaken, Mr. Bodo writes, "for a coal-fired hydroelectric facility somewhere in the Ukraine." The contest pitted John McEnroe, who at the age of 20 had not yet won a Grand Slam, against the 36-year-old Ilie Nastase. As his coach once said, "Ilie doesn't have a brain, he has a bird flying around inside his head," and on this night the bird was more agitated than usual. Egged on by 10,000 beery fans, the players screamed expletives at each other and at the umpire. Nastase was penalized a point, then a game, for protesting calls for minutes at a time; ordered to serve, he simply stood at the base line, prompting the umpire to disqualify him. Amid flying trash and catcalls, the tournament director, William F. Talbert, removed the umpire and ordered play to resume; McEnroe then defeated the distracted Nastase for the second time.

 

The lessons of "the Thursday night massacre" were not lost on McEnroe. "I'll be the first to admit that I did play the system," he told Mr. Bodo. "I manipulated it more than some people realized. . . . In most cases I was fully aware of what I was doing on the court during an outburst, and I knew how I was -- or wasn't -- going to have to pay a price for it." The ruling bodies in tennis ought to heed McEnroe's simple advice: "Really, tennis should be more like baseball. If you go too far, you should get thrown out. And if you really go nuts, you should get suspended."

 

Reading Mr. Baltzell's book is like eavesdropping on a couple of Old Grotonians as they polish off a bottle of port at their club. "But who, I should like to ask, is to say that class snobbery is any worse than classless snobbery?" he writes. "For snobs are often the product of leveling upward and confident ages, while reverse snobbery or slipshod snobbery (in dress, manners, grammar, professional pride and craftsmanship in general) are insidious social diseases of leveling downward and despairing ages such as our own." Mr. Baltzell is also a scholarly cat who keeps getting caught in family trees. For example, the lineage of Richard D. Sears, winner of the first American title in 1881, is traced all the way back to Richard (the Pilgrim) Sears, who settled on Cape Cod in 1637.

 

While Mr. Baltzell may be an unabashed snob, he is by no means a bigot. He comes down hard on well-born WASP's for their frequent anti-Semitism and racism, and correctly notes that these prejudices contributed to the decline of upper-class authority after World War II. He realizes that gentlemen are of all colors and creeds, as he demonstrates when writing about Arthur Ashe. "In the increasingly uncivil quarter-century between his victory at Forest Hills, in 1968, and his tragic death, in 1993," Mr. Baltzell says, "the moral life of Arthur Ashe has constantly renewed my faith in the staying power of the gentlemanly ideal."

 

Bill Tilden presents a quandary for Mr. Baltzell. On the one hand, he came from "pure English stock" (breeding is mentioned so often that "Sporting Gentlemen" sometimes reads like a program for the Westminster Kennel Club show); he was educated at good schools (Germantown Academy and Penn); he was a devotee of the arts, especially music; and, most important, he was "the last cricket-club-bred gentleman to win our National Tennis Championship" (a point made three times). On the other hand, Tilden engaged in "blatant showmanship, occasional outrageous tantrums, unreasonable arrogance, and quarrelsome and intimidating behavior towards linesmen and tennis officialdom in general"; he was also twice convicted and sent to prison for molesting young boys. So much for the good old days; as Mr. Baltzell concludes, "the gentleman and the genius were always at war" in the person of Big Bill Tilden.

 

TENNIS missed a great opportunity in 1933, Mr. Baltzell believes, when the United States Lawn Tennis Association was denied its petition to hold an open tournament at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia. "Like golf, tennis today might have still been a class game," he writes, "held in classy surroundings like the Merion or Germantown cricket clubs rather than in such tasteless surroundings as the Philadelphia Spectrum, the Cow Palace in San Francisco or vulgar Flushing Meadow." Mr. Baltzell insists, improbably, that it's not too late: "The American tennis establishment must concentrate on remaking tennis into an elite and quality game by increasing the quality of the audience by decreasing the stadium size and the money take."

 

A better bet to straighten out tennis, or at least its prima donnas, might be Steve Denton, a touring pro from Texas who, in Mr. Bodo's words, "took it upon himself to be a one-man jerk patrol." He grabbed one jerk by the throat after a match and threatened another with a licking if he came into the locker room (the player went to his hotel without showering or changing). The Association of Tennis Professionals gave Denton its Sportsmanship Award for 1982. In this day and age, that's a bigger victory than a Grand Slam.