Highlights
- The Met swapped its canceled John Galliano retrospective for extraORDINARY, a show built on jeans, tees and puffers.
- Curator Andrew Bolton admits he had no plan B and refused to replace Galliano with another big-name designer show.
- Anna Wintour reportedly sat out the theme pick, and the official dress code for the May 3, 2027 gala is still secret.
Fashion’s biggest night just swapped couture for the contents of your laundry basket. The 2027 theme will be “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday,” Vogue and the Met’s Costume Institute announced Thursday.
Yes, the Met Gala is doing jeans. The show centers on everyday, “seemingly unremarkable” clothing like T-shirts, jeans and puffer jackets.
This is a cleanup job after a very public implosion. The Met and John Galliano announced on August 31 that “John Galliano: Horizons,” previously set to open in May 2027, would not go forward.
The backlash wrote itself. Galliano was convicted in France in 2011 over antisemitic and anti-Asian remarks made during a rant at a Paris bar, and he was fired from Dior that same year.
Anna Wintour initially dug in. She insisted the exhibition “won’t shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past.”
The calendar didn’t help either. The gala was likely to fall on Yom HaShoah, the Jewish day of Holocaust remembrance.
Galliano finally pulled the plug himself on Instagram. He conceded that an exhibition honoring his work “would be painful for some.”
That made history for all the wrong reasons. The Costume Institute had never before pulled a show it had already announced publicly.
Curator Andrew Bolton was left with a blank calendar and a famous party to feed. “I didn’t have a plan B,” he told Vogue.
He also skipped the obvious fix. Bolton deliberately chose not to replace one master designer with another, and he said he wanted the show to be “as challenging and as provocative and as beautiful” as Galliano’s would have been.
The receipts are surprisingly fun. The exhibit will feature 200 to 230 pieces, including Brooke Shields‘ famed Calvin Klein jeans and pieces from Marc Jacobs‘ 1993 grunge collection for Perry Ellis.
There’s a nerdier second act. One half of the show looks at how designers rework basics like jeans and T-shirts, while the other focuses on throwaway materials such as paper, plastic and aluminum.
An insider had already warned WWD what to expect. The source said the replacement would be “spectacular and very intellectual, because that is who Andrew [Bolton] is.” Translation: bring your thesis to the steps.
It’s a cheap date by Met standards, too. Many of the pieces will come from the museum’s own collection, and Bolton described the show as a continuation of this year’s “Costume Art” exhibition.
Now for the real gossip. According to the New York Times, Wintour was not involved in picking the replacement theme. For the woman who usually signs off on the napkins, that’s a big deal.
The red carpet is still a mystery. The official dress code hasn’t been announced, though Bolton said he hoped exhibit visitors might show up in their own jeans and favorite T-shirts.
Somewhere, a stylist is already sketching a five-figure Canadian tuxedo. Expect “elevated basics” to mean anything but basic.
The gala hits May 3, and extraORDINARY opens to the public May 9, 2027, running through January 9, 2028. Playing it safe has never looked this expensive.
