The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Friday that fashion designer John Galliano will be the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition. The show, titled John Galliano: Horizons, will also serve as the theme of the annual Met Gala.
Galliano becomes only the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition at The Met. The two previous living designers to be honored were Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017.
According to Deadline, the exhibition will be the first major museum retrospective to cover the full scope of Galliano's four-decade career. It will bring together garments, accessories, sketches, research books, archival materials and toiles tracing his work from his 1984 Central Saint Martins graduation collection through his tenures at Givenchy, Christian Dior and Maison Margiela. The exhibition culminates with his Spring/Summer 2024 Maison Margiela Artisanal collection, which many critics called one of the defining couture presentations of the decade.
The show will draw heavily from the Costume Institute's own collection, which The Met describes as the largest holding of Galliano's work in the world.
The exhibition will not sidestep the circumstances that derailed Galliano's career. In 2011, he was dismissed from Christian Dior and his own label after making racist, antisemitic and anti-Asian remarks. A Paris court convicted him of public insults based on race, religion, ethnicity or origin. Organizers say the exhibition will examine the relationship between artistic achievement and ethical accountability directly, rather than framing the story as one of fall and redemption.
Max Hollein, The Met's Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, addressed both sides of Galliano's legacy in a statement. "John Galliano has exerted a profound influence on fashion over the past four decades," Hollein said. "His work brings historical inquiry, artistic imagination, theatrical expression and technical experimentation into dynamic relation."
The exhibition is curated by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, who has written about and exhibited Galliano's work previously. Bolton described the conceptual framework of the show in a statement. "Every Galliano collection begins as a journey among things separated by time, place or medium: portrait and posture, silhouette and story, memory and material," he said. "Horizons approaches fashion as a form of cartography, mapping not territories but affinities, tensions and transformations. It traces how images become ideas, ideas become material and material becomes emotion. Yet a horizon reveals not only what lies before us but also where we stand."
No opening date within spring 2027 has been announced.
