The Metropolitan Museum of Art has unveiled a new theme for the 2027 Met Gala, turning attention to everyday clothing and materials after abandoning a planned exhibition honouring controversial fashion designer John Galliano.
The Costume Institute announced on Thursday, November 5, that its spring 2027 exhibition will be titled “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday.” The exhibition will explore how designers transform familiar garments, ordinary objects and commonplace materials into innovative fashion and wearable art.
The annual fundraising gala will take place on Monday, May 3, 2027, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The accompanying exhibition will open to the public on May 9 and run until January 9, 2028.
Curated by Andrew Bolton, the exhibition will examine how designers use craftsmanship, construction, material experimentation and creative reinterpretation to give familiar items new meaning.
In a statement announcing the exhibition, Bolton said: “The ordinary is never quite as simple as it appears.”
He explained that everyday garments such as jeans, white shirts and sweatshirts can carry personal histories, memories and emotional attachments.
“A pair of jeans, a white shirt, or a sweatshirt can hold traces of a life—the habits, memories, and attachments that make something our own,” Bolton said.
He added that designers use familiar forms and materials to reveal possibilities people might otherwise overlook.
“The exhibition invites us to discover how much imagination the everyday can hold, and how looking again might change what we value and care for,” he said.
The exhibition will explore two principal sections, titled “Familiar Forms” and “Common Matter”.
The “Familiar Forms” section will examine how designers reinterpret everyday wardrobe staples, including jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, biker jackets, trench coats and puffer jackets.
Rather than presenting these garments simply as functional clothing, the exhibition will show how designers change their proportions, materials, construction and styling to create new expressions of identity, belonging and creativity.
The section will feature work from designers including Matthieu Blazy for Bottega Veneta, Marc Jacobs, Junya Watanabe, Jonathan Anderson for Loewe and Pierpaolo Piccioli for Moncler.
The second section, “Common Matter”, will focus on the transformation of ordinary materials and familiar objects into garments.
Designers will explore the creative possibilities of paper, plastic and metal, while other pieces will incorporate objects such as cutlery, buttons and broken china.
The exhibition will feature creations by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, Issey Miyake and Glenn Martens for Maison Margiela.
Recycling, upcycling and reuse will run through both sections, highlighting how designers can give existing materials a new purpose rather than relying entirely on new resources.
The exhibition will open with selected garments from Japanese designer Jun Takahashi’s autumn/winter 2024–25 collection for Undercover. It will close with designs by Kunihiko Morinaga for Anrealage, whose work explores unusual proportions and geometric shapes.
The exhibition design, created by 1009, will also place visitors’ own clothing in visual conversation with the displayed pieces, encouraging them to reconsider the creativity and meaning in what they wear every day.
The new theme replaces the previously planned exhibition, “John Galliano: Horizons”, which the museum had expected to present in spring 2027.
The proposed retrospective attracted criticism because of Galliano’s history of antisemitic and racist remarks.
In 2011, videos emerged showing the British designer making antisemitic comments during an incident at a Paris café. Christian Dior subsequently dismissed him from his position as creative director. A French court later found him guilty of public insults based on origin, race or religion.
The Met’s decision to dedicate a major exhibition to Galliano’s career prompted objections from Jewish leaders, members of the public and other critics, who questioned whether the museum should honour a designer with that history.
The museum and Galliano announced on August 31, 2026, that the exhibition would not proceed.
In his statement, Galliano acknowledged the concerns surrounding the proposed retrospective and said he did not want the controversy to distract from the Costume Institute’s work.
“I understand that meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition, institutional recognition or a single public gesture,” he said, adding that accountability required “listening, learning and one’s conduct over time.”
The cancellation left the Costume Institute with the task of developing a replacement exhibition for spring 2027.
Speaking to Vogue after the new theme’s announcement, Bolton said he had not prepared an alternative concept in advance.
“I didn’t have a plan B,” he said.
He explained that he wanted the replacement to stand on its own rather than feel like a substitute for the Galliano retrospective.
“It was really important to come up with an exhibition that wasn’t just a masterwork show or something that we could do a little bit more easily,” Bolton said. “I wanted it to be as challenging and as provocative and as beautiful as a John show would have been.”
