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The Metropolitan Museum of Art confirmed on Friday that its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition will be dedicated to John Galliano. Titled John Galliano: Horizons, the show opens 9 May 2027 at The Met Fifth Avenue and runs through 9 January 2028, curated by Andrew Bolton with Costume Institute staff Stephanie Kramer and Emily Mushaben, with exhibition design by the studio 1009.
The announcement makes Galliano the third living designer given a solo Costume Institute exhibition, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017.
Horizons traces Galliano from his 1984 graduate collection at Central Saint Martins through his tenures at Givenchy and Christian Dior, ending with the ten years he spent at Maison Margiela. This partnership closed in December 2025. Most of what’s on view is pulled from the Costume Institute’s own holdings, which curators say hold more Galliano pieces than any other institution keeps in one place.
The show will be staged in the Condé Nast Galleries, the Costume Institute’s nearly 12,000-square-foot space adjacent to the Great Hall, which opened in May 2026 with the exhibition Costume Art and gave the department its first purpose-built home for an annual spring show. Max Hollein, the museum’s director and chief executive, said the designer “has exerted a profound influence on fashion over the past four decades.”
Anna Wintour, who has championed Galliano’s work since the 1990s and was photographed with him at a Musée Rodin event earlier this year, told Vogue there is “no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale.”
Bolton curated that show as well, and the Met has said the space will also host exhibitions from its other curatorial departments in the gaps between its spring shows. That exhibition paired garments from the Costume Institute with artworks from across the Museum’s collection, and its Met Gala, held 4 May 2026, was co-chaired by Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour, with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos serving as lead sponsors and honorary chairs for the evening.
Galliano was fired from Dior in 2011 after footage surfaced of him delivering an antisemitic tirade in a Paris bar. The Met has said Horizons will engage with that history as part of the exhibition, alongside the four decades of design work that preceded and followed it. The museum’s board is reported to have put plans for a Galliano retrospective on hold in 2024. The New York Times later reported that the proposal returned this year after Galliano, Bolton, Wintour and Jewish community leaders in New York held a series of private meetings.
As tradition dictates, Horizons will set the theme for the 2027 Met Gala. The dress code, co-chairs and host committee have not yet been announced.
Burberry, founded in 1856 and a royal warrant holder since 1955, and the Victoria and Albert Museum announced The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon. The exhibition opens on 21 September 2026 in the V&A’s Prince Consort Gallery, a venue seldom used for temporary exhibitions, and remains on view until 3 January 2027. The show marks the house’s 170th anniversary and coincides with the final day of London Fashion Week.
The display is arranged in three chapters, titled Invention, Craft and Creativity, moving from Thomas Burberry’s 1879 invention of cotton gabardine through the construction techniques that still define the coat, including a collar built from eight pieces and finished with up to two hundred stitches, before closing on nineteen runway looks from the past twenty-five years by designers including Daniel Lee, Riccardo Tisci and Christopher Bailey.
Bailey led the house for seventeen years from 2001, Tisci held the role from 2018 to 2022, and Lee has served as chief creative officer since. Burberry’s cotton gabardine is woven at the company’s mill in Keighley and tailored at its factory in Castleford, which the house acquired in 1972. Carly Eck, Burberry’s brand curator, called the trench “a global design icon rooted in British craftsmanship.”
Oriole Cullen, the V&A’s senior curator of fashion and textiles, framed the display as an early look at the museum’s forthcoming Burberry Gallery, describing the trench as a British staple that keeps evolving after a century in use.
Objects from the Burberry archive will be shown publicly for the first time, among them a trench worn by the designer Hardy Amies. The V&A arrangement runs beyond this one display.
Burberry has signed on for a longer arrangement that keeps its archive open to the museum’s curators as work continues toward the new gallery. It precedes The Burberry Gallery, a permanent fashion space at the museum opening in autumn 2028 with Burberry’s backing. The Prince Consort Gallery once held the V&A’s textile collection in mahogany cabinets before falling out of regular use, and this display marks one of its first public outings in years.
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