NEW YORK (AP) — And now, Take 2: The new Met Gala exhibit will celebrate everyday garments and materials like jeans and puffer jackets, paper and plastic — and how fashion designers transform them.
The new theme announced Thursday sounds about as far as can be imagined from the glittering, elaborate designs of John Galliano, the British designer originally slated to be the subject of the Met's fashion exhibit next spring — before that idea was scuttled
amid an outcry over past antisemitic statements.
The replacement show at the Met’s Costume Institute, “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday,” will be launched by the 2027 Met Gala, held traditionally on the first Monday in May. Using items in the museum’s collection, as well as loans and acquisitions, the exhibit aims to explore “how designers rework familiar garments, everyday objects, and commonplace materials through craft, construction, material experimentation, and conceptual wit,” the museum says.
It is being assembled, as always, by the institute’s head curator, Andrew Bolton. The idea had to come together quickly once the museum, along with Galliano himself, decided to cancel the scandal-plagued retrospective under pressure from donors, city officials and the Jewish community.
In an interview this week, Bolton described the challenge of coming up with a new idea from scratch after the cancellation of the Galliano show. The institute had already been collecting Galliano designs for the original show, which had been announced with fanfare in late July. The museum had promised to confront the British designer’s “derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception” — a reference to past antisemitic and racist statements. A month later, the show was scrapped entirely.
“I had no Plan B, to be honest,” Bolton said. “There wasn’t another exhibition already researched and ready to go.” He said the new idea had occurred to him while he was working on last year’s show, “Costume Art,” but had remained merely “a twinkle in my eye.”
That previous show, he said, “sort of led me to think more about how we experience clothing in everyday life, obviously through wearing it but (also) through memory and movement.”
“Everyday clothes carry extraordinary amounts of meaning,” Bolton said. “We have a favorite T-shirt, we have a favorite pair of jeans, and we wear them until they literally fall apart. And those meanings develop through wearing.”
The show looks at how designers make these garments into something different and unique. “I like the idea that designers turn these familiar things into these incredible sources of wonder,” he said.
The spring exhibit is launched each year by the starry Met Gala, a fundraiser for the museum's Costume Institute, where guests tour the show during cocktail hour. The most visible and photographed event on the fashion calendar is a much-coveted invite, drawing a mix of luminaries from the worlds of entertainment, business, sports and politics.
The exhibit's theme influences the evening's dress code, which will be announced at a later date — as will the newest slate of celebrity hosts for the May 3 gala.
One of the foremost critics of the Galliano exhibit was a past attendee, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who said she'd met many times with museum leaders to voice opposition. The gala would have, in 2027, fallen on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Menin said in August that the cancellation was “the correct decision, as the harm and pain this was causing was simply unacceptable.”
Galliano, long recognized as one of the fashion world’s biggest talents, spent years as creative director of Christian Dior. He was fired when a series of racist and antisemitic comments from 2010 and 2011 went viral, leading to his conviction in an antisemitism trial in France. Galliano spent several years involved in public and private efforts to make amends. He made a comeback in 2014 when he was hired by Paris fashion house Maison Margiela, where he remained for a decade.
“I remain fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past, particularly the hurt I caused to the Jewish and Asian communities, and I remain deeply sorry for it,” Galliano said in a statement when his exhibit was canceled.
The gala is overseen by Anna Wintour, Vogue’s global editorial director, one of the most influential figures in fashion and a longtime supporter of Galliano.
“John’s decision that the exhibition devoted to his work should not take place at this time is very courageous and a measure of the man he is,” Wintour said in an August statement. “I believe this is the right decision, and both he and the Museum have my full support.”
