Good morning. The top civilian in the Army resigned after repeatedly clashing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And you need to read this story about a school principal in Nepal who had less than 15 minutes to save 900 students from last week's flash flooding.

There's more below. I'm going to start, though, with the Met Gala. A fashion disaster.

For more than three decades, the editor and star maker Anna Wintour has presided over the Costume Institute's annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -- and its accompanying Met Gala, a glittery, billionaire- and celebrity-studded fund-raising dinner that has become the fashion world's equivalent of the Super Bowl. In fashion, few have had more power. How durable is it? Her role in the decision to honor an established antisemite, the designer John Galliano, at the 2027 Met Gala brought that into doubt.

Yesterday, Galliano pulled out of the exhibition planned to showcase his work. '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,' Galliano wrote in a statement. 'I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.' Why was he selected? Galliano was convicted of an antisemitic hate crime by a French court in 2011. He was said to have screamed 'Merry Christmas' at a woman in an Italian spa in 2019 who was speaking Hebrew with her daughter. The Times has quoted politicians, art-world heavies and Jewish leaders who were appalled by the pick. 'This is not a freedom of expression issue,' one New York assemblyman told my colleagues Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein. 'This is a judgment issue, and I am baffled that anyone saw this as anything other than a terrible idea.' Now the fallout could hurt Wintour's place in the cultural firmament. 'She's outlasted and outmaneuvered every person, obstacle and trend that has come along over the course of her career,' Jacob told me yesterday. 'But this is definitely one of the bigger missteps of her career.' Who is John Galliano? Many in the fashion world consider Galliano to be one of its most important contemporary designers.

He's 65, a child of Gibraltar who grew up in Britain and has lived in France for decades. He was the head designer at both Givenchy and Dior -- a four-time British Designer of the Year. He ran Dior from 1996 until 2011, when he said 'I love Hitler' at a bar and told some patrons that 'your mothers, your forefathers' would all be 'gassed.' That got him fired.

After a period of rehabilitation -- meeting with rabbis, apologizing a lot -- Galliano returned to fashion in 2014 as the creative director of Maison Margiela. Two moments in Galliano's public life stick out to me. The first was a 2000 show he mounted for Dior, his 'clochard' collection, which he said drew inspiration from the homeless population of Paris.

There were clothes that resembled piles of old newspapers and accessories fashioned of found objects, like little pony bottles of whiskey. The show drew mass demonstrations and accusations of heartless cruelty. Ben Stiller appeared to lampoon the show the next year in his satirical film 'Zoolander.' The second was a photograph captured by a paparazzo in New York City in 2013, two years after Galliano's hate-crime conviction: the designer dressed in what appeared to be a Hasidic costume, with a long, formal black overcoat and big black hat to match.

His publicist denied accusations that he was mocking anyone, but it could have been a plot point in 'Zoolander 2.' Creative genius isn't a license to offend. Who gets absolution? Perhaps, in 2026, Galliano's return should not have come as a surprise. Many Americans believe that cancel culture went too far, and lots of people banished by it have returned to public life -- Kevin Hart and Mel Gibson among them.

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