Met Gala 2027: Costume Institute Announces New Theme After John Galliano Controversy

The 2027 Met Gala has a new focus. On November 5, Vogue, alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, announced its new spring 2027 exhibition and Met Gala theme. And its new focus is on the “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday,” which will be curated by Andrew Bolton alongside Stephanie Kramer and Emily Mushaben. This pivot comes after designer John Galliano pulled out of the 2027 Met Gala months after political and civic leaders raised concerns over his previous racist and antisemitic comments that led to his termination as Dior’s creative director in 2011.The exhibition will be “devoted to the undersung beauty and allure of quotidian garments—think the aforementioned t-shirts and jeans, plus raincoats, sweatshirts, puffer jackets, and more. It will ask visitors ‘to see the everyday anew, and come at its subject from two perspectives: First, exploring how designers have reinvented and elevated archetypal garments to runway-worthy creations and then, secondly, highlight how humble, even ‘disposable’ materials—like paper, aluminum, and plastic—are transformed into wearable art.”“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 also said. “That was really important to me: to come up with an idea that wasn’t a substitute. And it had to have some sort of contemporary resonance.”Before this switch, the museum stated that the original exhibit, John Galliano: Horizons, was meant to “consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.” So now, this exploration of the extraORDINARY seems to be more focused on design and creation from a more sustainable viewpoint.So now that fashion’s biggest night is back on track with a new theme in hand, it will be interesting to see how all our favorite celebrities interpret this new theme. The Met Gala 2027 will take place on May 3, and the exhibit will open to the public on May 9, 2027, and run through January 9, 2028.Aiyana Ishmael is the style editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. In her work, Aiyana focuses on the culture of fashion and how it intertwines and shapes the zeitgeist. She is an award-winning journalist from Miami, Florida, and a graduate of the historically Black university, Florida A&M. She is a 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30: Media honoree, and her debut romance novella PASSING GAME is set to release March of 2027 (831 Stories/Simon & Schuster).