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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has replaced its cancelled John Galliano retrospective with an exhibition about the clothes people wear every day. The museum announced extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday as the Costume Institute’s Spring 2027 show, just over six months before its opening. It runs from Sunday, 9 May 2027 to 9 January 2028, in Gallery 099 at The Met Fifth Avenue. Member previews are set for 4, 6, 7 and 8 May.
The Galliano show was called off on 31 August 2026, when the Met and the designer announced together that John Galliano: Horizons, previously scheduled to open in May 2027, would not go ahead. Director Max Hollein said the decision followed “thoughtful discussions with John Galliano”. Galliano said it was best for the exhibition not to take place “at this time”.
Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, said he recognised “the pain and concern this exhibition has caused” and that, after “extensive discussion”, he supported the decision. Anna Wintour, a Met trustee, called Galliano’s decision “very courageous”.
Bolton organised the replacement. The exhibition design is by 1009, whose plan is to set the clothes visitors arrive in beside the works on view.
The Met’s pitch is that reworking a garment does not erase it: earlier functions and associations stay part of what the new design means. Bolton says “The ordinary is never quite as simple as it appears.” He adds that a pair of jeans, a white shirt or a sweatshirt can “hold traces of a life”, and that looking again might change what people value and care for.
The first gallery is given to Jun Takahashi’s Undercover collection for autumn/winter 2024-25, Watching a Working Woman. Its runway show was accompanied by a poem that Wim Wenders wrote and read about the daily life of a working mother, and the collection takes inspiration in part from his 2023 film Perfect Days. Garments are joined and layered until they are hard to recognise, which the Met reads as a picture of overlapping identities and responsibilities.
The show draws on the Costume Institute’s collection, key loans and new acquisitions. Reuse and upcycling recur throughout, the Met says, raising questions about how value is reassigned and what responsibility comes with producing and discarding clothes.
“Familiar Forms” groups works by garment type, from jeans and T-shirts to biker jackets and puffers, so that each form can be compared across designers. The named examples run from Marc Jacobs’s 1993 flannel shirt for Perry Ellis, the oldest, to Matthieu Blazy’s 2022-23 jeans for Bottega Veneta, the newest. In between are a 2006 shirt by Gianfranco Ferré, Junya Watanabe’s biker jacket from 2011-12, a 2022 ensemble by Jonathan Anderson for Loewe and a 2019-20 ensemble by Moncler 1 Pierpaolo Piccioli. Moncler is also the exhibition’s major funder.
“Common Matter” turns to materials. Paper, plastic and metal are its three central groupings, and the Met says folding, cutting and joining turn their physical properties into resources for invention. Perimeter displays will include works that incorporate cutlery and broken china.
Highlights include a 1992 dress by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela’s 1992-93 ensemble, a 2003 Helmut Lang jacket and Issey Miyake’s 1998-99 ensemble. The newest is a 2027 dress by Glenn Martens for Maison Margiela, the only named piece dated to the year the show opens.
The exhibition closes with Kunihiko Morinaga’s Anrealage, in garments from spring/summer 2009, autumn/winter 2009-10, autumn/winter 2020-21 and spring/summer 2021. Shirts and coats take on unexpected proportions when conceived around geometric forms, cubes and pyramids among them. The Met sets the two ends of the show against each other: the Undercover gallery asks how clothes accommodate the demands of daily life, and the Anrealage gallery how they accommodate the body.
extraORDINARY extends an inquiry begun in Costume Art, the Costume Institute’s current exhibition, which places the dressed body at the centre of aesthetic experience. The new show carries that question into everyday life, asking how significance develops through use and care.
The Met Gala, formally the Costume Institute Benefit, takes place on Monday 3 May 2027, six days before the public opening. The museum says further details will follow later. The Gala is the department’s primary source of annual funding for exhibitions and operations, with proceeds also supporting other museum activities. Public programmes tied to the exhibition will be announced in 2027.
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