John Galliano and the Met's 2027 Exhibit: Why It Won't Look Away from His Past

The Met's 2027 Costume Institute exhibition will honor designer John Galliano, only the third living designer to receive a solo show. The exhibit won't gloss over his 2011 antisemitic scandal, choosing instead to confront it directly.

The Met's 2027 Costume Institute exhibition will honor designer John Galliano, only the third living designer to receive a solo show. The exhibit won't gloss over his 2011 antisemitic scandal, choosing instead to confront it directly.

The Met has picked its next Costume Institute honoree, and it's a complicated one. The spring 2027 exhibition will be devoted to designer John Galliano. That makes him only the third living designer ever given a solo show at the museum, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017.

John Galliano at The Fashion Awards 2017 in London, England | Source: Getty Images

Titled "John Galliano: Horizons," the show runs at The Met Fifth Avenue from May 9, 2027 through January 9, 2028. It draws on what the museum calls the largest collection of Galliano's work in the world, spanning his 1984 graduation collection at Central Saint Martins all the way through his years at Maison Margiela.

Galliano’s selection raises questions due to his controversial past. The 65-year-old designer was fired from Christian Dior and his own label in 2011 after video surfaced of him making antisemitic remarks in a Paris bar. A French court convicted him of public insults based on race, religion, ethnicity, or origin and fined him roughly $8,500. However, the Met isn’t inclined to shy away from this.

John Galliano attending the "Vogue World : Paris Party" at Maxim's on June 23, 2024 | Source: Getty Inagesin Paris, France

In fact, Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator in charge, says the exhibit will look at "how Galliano has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work."

The show is split into three parts. "Bearings" opens with a timeline connecting Galliano’s career to the wider cultural moment, and confronts the 2010-2011 scandal head-on rather than smoothing it into a redemption story. "Horizons" traces his creative influences, history, geography, performance. "Atlas of Transformation" follows his actual process, from sketch to finished garment.

Met director Max Hollein frames it as an attempt to hold both things at once, calling it "an expansive examination of his creative practice while attending closely to the historical, cultural, and ethical circumstances through which his work is understood."

Anna Wintour, who has backed Galliano for decades, isn't shying away from it either. "He's a great designer and his career isn't defined by a moment," she said. The exhibit, she added, "won't shy away from any of the darkness in John's past."

Anna Wintour and John Galliano at Vogue's Forces of Fashion Conference at Milk Studios on October 12, 2017 in New York City | Source: Getty Images

Galliano himself has addressed it, too. In Kevin Macdonald's 2024 documentary, "High & Low — John Galliano," he called his own conduct "a disgusting thing, foul thing," and said he was in the grip of addiction when the outbursts happened.

Since stepping down from Maison Margiela at the end of 2024 after a decade there, Galliano told Vogue that he had been “going to museums, walking through the woods without my phone, getting lost but not being afraid to get lost, and relying on instinct again, reconnecting with instinct, like breathing correctly.”

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In March 2026, Zara announced a two-year creative partnership with him, reworking pieces from its own archive into new collections starting that September

Between that and the Met, one thing is clear. John Galliano is not disappearing quietly, and fashion isn't asking him to.