The Met Drops Its John Galliano Show and Goes Ahead With extraORDINARY
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has cancelled its planned exhibition on the fashion designer John Galliano. The museum will still hold its 2027 Met Gala, the annual fundraising party for its Costume Institute, the fashion department, and will open a replacement show in May.
The new exhibition is called "extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday." According to the Met's own exhibition page, it looks at how designers take familiar clothes, materials and objects and transform them, asking visitors to see those everyday things anew.
The show will include between 200 and 230 objects. Roughly a third will come from the Costume Institute's own collection. The rest will be loans or donations from fashion brands, according to ArtNews and the New York Times.
Two pieces stand out. One is a pair of Calvin Klein jeans worn by the actress Brooke Shields. The other is a pair of trompe l'oeil jeans, a French term for a design meant to fool the eye, created by Matthieu Blazy for the Italian label Bottega Veneta.
Max Hollein, the Met's director, said the show reveals the rich relationship between fashion, art and everyday life.
The cancelled show had a far more troubled path. The Met had announced in August that its May 2027 exhibition would be "John Galliano: Horizons." Galliano is a British designer who once led the Paris house of Dior. In 2011, at a Paris café, he made antisemitic and anti-Asian remarks. Dior fired him as artistic director, and a French court later found him guilty of antisemitism.
The planned gala fell on Yom HaShoah, Israel's day of Holocaust remembrance. Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton said he and Anna Wintour, the longtime editor of Vogue who co-chairs the gala, had involved members of the Jewish community in shaping the Galliano show. Still, the plan drew opposition. Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace Gallery, threatened to withdraw a plan to donate artworks to the museum after his death if the Galliano show went ahead, ArtNews reported.
Wintour had earlier backed the show. In a statement issued alongside the cancellation, she praised Galliano as courageous. The Met's release for extraORDINARY, issued on Thursday, did not quote or mention her. The New York Times reported that Wintour played no role in choosing the new theme.
For the public, the practical picture is simple. The gala and a major fashion show open in May 2027 under a new theme. Behind the 200-plus objects are the staff who will pack, move and insure them, and the brands that agreed to lend or give pieces from their own archives.
