Met Gala 2027 theme will focus on jeans and everyday clothes

The exhibition, organized by Costume Institute curator in charge Andrew Bolton with Stephanie Kramer and Emily Mushaben, will divide into two sections: Familiar Forms and Common Matter.

Theme replaces cancelled Galliano show

The new theme follows John Galliano's withdrawal from John Galliano: Horizons, the retrospective planned in his name. Galliano announced on 31 August that he was stepping away from the show after backlash over past antisemitic and racist remarks. "After much reflection and discussion with The Met and all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time," he said in a statement shared on Instagram. Anna Wintour said she supported Galliano and the museum's decision to move forward without the exhibition.

Bolton says he had no plan B

Bolton told Vogue on 5 November that he had no fallback waiting. "I didn't have a plan B," he said. "It was really important to come up with an exhibition that wasn't just a masterwork show or something that we could do a little bit more easily." He added that he wanted the replacement to be "as challenging and as provocative and as beautiful as a John show would have been," and that it had to have "some sort of contemporary resonance."

In the museum's press statement, Bolton put the idea more briefly: "The ordinary is never quite as simple as it seems." He also said the 2026 Costume Art exhibition, which opened the Costume Institute's nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, led him to think more about how people experience clothing in everyday life through habit, touch, movement and sensation. He said he wanted visitors to leave "looking differently at the clothes they arrived in," with a greater sense of what is worth noticing, valuing and caring for.

What the exhibition will show

Familiar Forms will focus on garments many wardrobes already hold: jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, trench coats and puffer jackets. Common Matter will look at materials not usually associated with clothing, including paper, plastic and metal, and at objects such as cutlery, broken china and buttons. Recycling, upcycling and reuse will run through the show.

"The exhibition will examine how craft, construction, material experimentation, and conceptual wit give these ordinary forms extraordinary possibilities," the Met's statement said.

Reports give different piece counts. RNZ put the show at around 230 pieces, many sourced from the museum's own collection. ELLE said it will bring together more than 200 pieces, roughly a third from the Met and the rest on loan or donated. The two accounts differ on the total and on the split between museum-owned and borrowed pieces.

ELLE listed Charles James's 1930s couture puffer coat and Marc Jacobs's grunge-era Perry Ellis pieces among the objects on show. It also cited the Calvin Klein jeans Brooke Shields wore in the brand's 1980 advertisement, Junya Watanabe's leather biker jacket and Matthieu Blazy's trompe l'oeil leather jeans for Bottega Veneta.

One 2026 guest wore the everyday look

At the 2026 gala, whose theme was Costume Art and whose dress code was Fashion Is Art, model Bhavitha Mandava wore a Chanel outfit cut from silk muslin and finished to look like denim jeans and a half-zip pullover. RNZ reported that many thought the look too workaday for the night.

What happens next

The gala will take place on 3 May 2027. The exhibition opens to the public on 9 May 2027 and runs through 9 January 2028. The Met has not announced the full lineup of 2027 co-chairs.