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Beyond the crowds and the glare of the spotlight, there appears to be little overlap between the hard-charging world of professional women’s basketball and the glamour and spectacle of the Met Gala, held each May in New York. But the current crises surrounding both the gala and games reflects something much deeper: the startling failure of leadership plaguing progressive-leaning cultural institutions across America.

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There was a cringey inevitability to the decision by couturier John Galliano on Monday to bow out as honouree of next year’s Met Gala and an accompanying exhibition of his work. After all, how else could it have ended for a designer whose trail of offensive, antisemitic behaviour is so severe, it was deemed criminal by the French legal system?

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Yet in the month between the announcement of the Galliano gala on July 31 and his Instagram post noting its demise on Monday, what’s become most clear is not the severity of Galliano’s behaviour back in France, but the weakness of those tasked with managing its fallout in America more than a decade later.

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Much like the WNBA’s failure to settle the current brouhaha over biological men playing in professional women’s sports, Gala organizers Vogue magazine and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have done everything wrong here. They’ve failed their fans. They’ve failed their sponsors. They’ve failed their “talent” — including Galliano. But in both instances, most glaring of all has been a massive failure of imagination and accountability.

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How else did the Met and Vogue chief Anna Wintour expect the public to react to the Galliano news? Both the museum and magazine have been at the forefront of global diversity and anti-racism efforts over the past decade — yet now they’re feting a serial antisemite? No wonder the outraged — from fashion legends to Jewish leaders — were so, well, outraged!

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The outrage is actually far stronger — and understandable — at pro-women’s basketball stadiums throughout the United States. There, star players like Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever find themselves — like Galliano with the Met — navigating culture wars without a steady commander to guide them through the front lines.

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Tall and blonde and beautiful, Cunningham — who’s made her aversion to biological men competing in women’s sports part of her brand — has become the public face of the unsettled status of transwomen in female professional basketball.

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For many, Cunningham’s position makes perfect sense: even after comprehensive hormonal interventions, biological men retain a physical advantage over biological women and should be barred from competing against them. But this, like Galliano’s history of Jew-hatred, is merely the most obvious point of conflict.