The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on November 5 that its 2027 Costume Institute exhibition will focus on everyday clothes and the designers who transform them, replacing a canceled retrospective of John Galliano. The Met’s announcement set the annual fundraising gala for Monday, May 3, and the public exhibition for May 9, 2027, through January 9, 2028, at the museum’s Fifth Avenue location in New York.
The show, extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday, will put jeans, T-shirts and puffer coats alongside designs made from paper, plastic and metal. The museum plans to draw on its own holdings, loans and new acquisitions. It will organize much of the exhibition around recognizable garments and materials, so visitors can compare what different designers do with the same starting point.
The announcement settles what the public will see next spring after the museum and Galliano dropped the earlier exhibition in August. It also gives the annual gala a new point of reference. The exhibition will inform the evening’s dress code, but the museum has yet to announce that code or name the gala’s hosts.
How the replacement took shape
The museum and Galliano announced on August 31 that John Galliano: Horizons would no longer go ahead. In that statement, Galliano apologized for the harm his past remarks caused, particularly to Jewish and Asian communities, and acknowledged that an exhibition honoring his work would be painful for some. The statement left the museum without a publicly announced replacement for its spring show.
Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, told the Associated Press that he did not have another exhibition ready when the Galliano plans fell through. The new subject grew out of a question he had considered while working on the museum’s current show: how clothes acquire meaning when people wear them repeatedly. Bolton told AP that about a third of the objects would come from the museum’s collection, with the balance supplied by loans or gifts.
What happens when a designer starts with jeans
One section, “Familiar Forms,” will group pieces by garment type, including biker jackets, trench coats and puffers. Among the examples cited by Harper’s Bazaar are Matthieu Blazy’s leather jeans for Bottega Veneta, designed to look like denim, and pieces from Marc Jacobs’s grunge collection for Perry Ellis. A visitor can recognize the shape of a pair of jeans before noticing that the designer has changed the very material that normally defines it.
The puffer group will include a Charles James coat from the 1930s on loan from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and a Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat, according to AP. The examples give the museum a way to show how a construction associated with warmth can produce strikingly different silhouettes. The comparisons also allow designers from different eras to be seen together without requiring a survey of each career. Another example carries a history outside the runway: Bolton told AP that Brooke Shields contributed the Calvin Klein jeans from the advertising campaign she appeared in at age 15. Their association with the campaign gives visitors a way to consider how a familiar garment can take on a public identity through the way it is marketed and worn.
From the workday to the runway
The opening gallery will feature pieces from Jun Takahashi’s Undercover collection Watching a Working Woman. As Vogue reported, the collection drew partly on Wim Wenders’s film Perfect Days, and the director wrote and read a poem about a working mother for the runway presentation. The clothes use layering and collage to change the appearance of familiar pieces, giving the exhibition a starting point in the act of getting dressed.
A second main section, “Common Matter,” will turn from familiar shapes to the things designers use to make them. Its examples include paper clothing and pieces that incorporate objects such as broken china or cutlery. The museum plans to close with work by Anrealage’s Kunihiko Morinaga, who builds familiar garments around forms such as cubes and spheres. Those pieces pose a different question from the opening gallery: how much of what people call fit depends on the body a garment assumes it will be worn on?
The gala and the public exhibition serve different audiences
The show continues a line of inquiry from Costume Art, the current exhibition pairing clothing with works from elsewhere in the museum’s collection. That show inaugurated nearly 12,000 square feet of galleries next to the Great Hall, a space the museum says will house the institute’s annual spring exhibitions. The new show applies that sustained attention to objects museum visitors may already be wearing when they arrive.
The gala, meanwhile, is the institute’s principal source of annual funding for exhibitions, acquisitions, publications and operations, according to the Met. Instagram is the lead supporter of the 2027 exhibition and benefit, with major funding from Moncler and additional support from Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue. The museum has also scheduled member previews on May 4 and May 6 through 8. The gala will offer the first look at the show; the public opening six days later will begin an eight-month run.
