A new theme for next year’s Met Gala exhibit was announced Thursday, two months after event organizers scrapped their original idea to honor British designer John Galliano following backlash over his past anti-Jewish and anti-Asian remarks.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which hosts the annual star-studded event commonly known as fashion’s biggest night, said the replacement exhibit will examine how fashion designers transform conventional objects and everyday clothing to create new garments.
“From jeans, T-shirts, and puffer coats to paper, plastic, and metal, the exhibition will reveal how the seemingly unremarkable can inspire delight, surprise, and wonder,” the museum said in a press release Thursday. “The exhibition will examine how craft, construction, material experimentation, and conceptual wit give these ordinary forms extraordinary possibilities.”
Titled “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday,” the exhibit is being assembled by the Met’s Costume Institute, which curates the exhibit and theme of the Met Gala, an annual fundraiser for the institute.
The exhibit’s theme typically determines the dress code for the Met Gala, which traditionally falls on the first Monday in May.
Andrew Bolton, head curator at the Costume Institute, spoke to The Associated Press this week about the challenges he faced coming up with a new idea following the cancellation of the Galliano show.
“I had no Plan B, to be honest,” Bolton said. “There wasn’t another exhibition already researched and ready to go.”
With little time to come up with a new idea, Bolton said he relied on a passing thought he had while working on the last Met Gala exhibition, which explored the relationship different types of bodies have with clothing.
That previous show “sort of led me to think more about how we experience clothing in everyday life,” Bolton said. “We have a favorite T-shirt, we have a favorite pair of jeans, and we wear them until they literally fall apart.”
“Everyday clothes carry extraordinary amounts of meaning,” he added. “I like the idea that designers turn these familiar things into these incredible sources of wonder.”
Before changing course, the Costume Institute had already been collecting Galliano designs for the original show, which was announced in late July.
As controversy ensued, the museum said it would not shy away from confronting the designer’s “derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception,” but the exhibit in his honor was ultimately canceled in August.
At the time, museum director Max Hollein said the institution and Galliano decided together not to proceed with the original show.
The influential Galliano spent years as the creative director of Christian Dior. He was fired in 2011 over a series of racist and antisemitic comments that went viral online. That same year, the designer was convicted of antisemitic abuse in France after berating a couple at a cafe in Paris. Galliano blamed the behavior on substance abuse and testified in court that he had no recollection of the events.
Galliano later made a comeback in 2014 when he was hired by Paris fashion house Maison Margiela, where he remained for a decade.
If left unchanged, the unveiling of the Galliano exhibit would have coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 3, 2027.
Longtime Met Gala chair Anna Wintour, who is also Vogue’s global editorial director and a longtime supporter of Galliano, supported Hollein’s and Galliano’s joint decision to cancel the show.
“John’s decision that the exhibition devoted to his work should not take place at this time is very courageous and a measure of the man he is,” Wintour said in an August statement. “I believe this is the right decision, and both he and the Museum have my full support.”
