Met Gala Exhibit Turns From Galliano to Everyday Fashion

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute will explore how designers transform familiar clothes and materials in its next spring exhibition. Titled “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday,” the show will feature items such as jeans and puffer jackets, as well as paper and plastic.

The exhibition will launch with the 2027 Met Gala, scheduled for May 3. Its dress code and celebrity hosts have not yet been announced. The annual event raises money for the Costume Institute, and guests traditionally visit the exhibition during the evening.

Curator Andrew Bolton said the idea grew from thinking about how people experience clothing through wearing it, memory and movement. He described everyday garments as accumulating meaning over time, and said designers can turn familiar objects into sources of wonder.

The new exhibition replaces a retrospective devoted to John Galliano, which was canceled after criticism of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist remarks. The museum and Galliano had announced the earlier plan in July, then abandoned it about a month later amid opposition from donors, public officials and members of the Jewish community. Bolton said there was no prepared alternative exhibition when the plan was dropped.

Galliano was dismissed from Christian Dior after his comments from 2010 and 2011 became public, and was convicted in an antisemitism case in France. He later worked at Maison Margiela for a decade. When the retrospective was canceled, he expressed remorse for the harm caused, while Vogue editorial director Anna Wintour backed the decision to withdraw the show.