The 2027 Met Gala Will Honor John Galliano: What We Know About “Horizons”

The Met Gala has its next theme, and it will start an argument. The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on July 31 that the Costume Institute’s spring 2027 exhibition, and so the theme of the 2027 Met Gala, is John Galliano: Horizons. The gala falls on Monday, May 3, and the exhibition runs from May 9, 2027, to Jan. 9, 2028, per W Magazine. Here’s what we know.

What is the exhibition?

A career survey of the 65-year-old designer, from his 1984 Central Saint Martins graduate show to his years at Givenchy, Christian Dior, his own label and Maison Margiela, ending with his viral Spring 2024 Artisanal show for Margiela, with its porcelain-glass makeup and cinched silhouettes. It is organized in three “movements”: “Bearings,” which sets his work in cultural context; “Horizons,” on his sources, from geography to performance; and “Atlas of Transformation,” on process, with sketches, toiles and finished garments, according to Who What Wear. Curator Andrew Bolton said 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.”

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It is only the third time the Met Gala has honored a living designer, after Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017, W notes.

Why is it controversial?

Galliano was fired from Dior and his own label in 2011 after a video surfaced of an antisemitic tirade in a Paris bar, and was convicted by a French court. He returned in 2014 as creative director of Margiela and stepped down in late 2024. The museum says it won’t look away: the exhibition “will directly address the rupture caused by his antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct in 2010 and 2011,” and “consider his subsequent treatment for substance addiction.”

Anna Wintour, who picks the gala’s hosts, said in a statement quoted by W: “The exhibition won’t shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him.” The museum’s own framing is that it will not present “a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption,” and will look at how a designer’s work is received over time.

Why should music fans care?

Because the gala’s red carpet is a performance venue. Galliano’s Margiela has already produced some of its best moments: Rihanna’s pope-inspired look in 2018 and the theatrical Galliano looks Kim Kardashian and Zendaya wore in 2024. This year, Olivier Rousteing dressed Beyoncé for the gala, and Dior, which dismissed Galliano in 2011, is now led by Jonathan Anderson. W expects extreme hourglass shapes, bias cuts and theatricality on the carpet.

What’s still missing?

The dress code and the co-chairs. The museum hasn’t named co-chairs, whom Wintour picks with the Costume Institute and reveals a few months ahead of the event. For 2023’s Lagerfeld show, the dress code was simply “In honor of Karl.” The Galliano prompt, as is customary, will take its cue from the exhibition’s theme.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.