The Metropolitan Museum of Art has named John Galliano the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, John Galliano: Horizons, making the British designer only the third living designer ever honoured with a solo show at the museum, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017.
The accompanying Met Gala will take Horizonsas its official theme.
Vogue‘s Anna Wintour, a longtime champion of Galliano’s work, called him a natural choice for the honour.
“There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” she said in a statement.
“His body of work, at Dior, Givenchy, Margiela, his namesake label and more, combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together in a brilliant way.”
Curator Andrew Bolton described the show’s guiding concept as treating “fashion as a form of cartography, mapping not territories but affinities, tensions, and transformations,” adding that the exhibition will examine “how Galliano has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work.”
Organisers have been explicit that the show will not sidestep the events of 2011, when Galliano was dismissed from both Christian Dior and his own label after making racist and antisemitic remarks, and was subsequently convicted by a Paris court for public insults based on race, religion and ethnicity.
According to the New York Times, the decision to proceed followed a closed-door meeting in May between Galliano, Bolton, Wintour and several Jewish community leaders in New York.
Spanning garments, sketches, research books and archival materials drawn from the Costume Institute’s own holdings, the exhibition traces Galliano’s full career, from his celebrated 1984 graduation collection at Central Saint Martins through his tenures at Givenchy and Dior to his current role at Maison Margiela.
John Galliano: Horizonsruns from 9 May 2027 through 9 January 2028, with the Met Gala serving as its traditional fundraising kickoff.
2026-08-01 08:17:00
