The Costume Institute’s spring 2027 exhibition examines the career of John Galliano, one of the most inventive and influential designers of the past four decades.
John Galliano: Horizons, the first major museum exhibition on the designer, will examine the full breadth of his creative output. Comprising garments, accessories, sketches, toiles, research books, and archival materials, the exhibition will reveal how Galliano brings places, histories, artistic traditions, narratives, and identities into unexpected relation and transforms these encounters into imaginative garments.
It will draw extensively from The Costume Institute’s holdings of Galliano’s work—the largest collection of its kind in the world—including examples from his landmark 1984 graduation collection at Central Saint Martins in London, through his formative eponymous collections and appointments at the prominent Paris houses Givenchy and Christian Dior, to his later tenure at Maison Margiela, culminating in his critically acclaimed spring/summer 2024 collection.
Alongside Galliano’s extraordinary creative accomplishments, the exhibition will address the derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception. In doing so, the exhibition will consider how artistic achievement should be understood alongside ethical accountability.
The exhibition will be organized into three movements. The first, “Bearings,” will open with a conceptual chronology connecting Galliano’s career and collections to broader historical and cultural events. It will directly address the rupture caused by his antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian conduct in 2010 and 2011, which resulted in his dismissal from Christian Dior and his eponymous label and his conviction by a Paris court for public insults based on race, religion, ethnicity, or origin. It will also consider his subsequent treatment for substance addiction and his later public acknowledgment of his actions. Rather than presenting a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption, the gallery will examine how memory, experience, cultural values, and historical circumstances continually reshape the reception of a designer’s work. It will invite visitors to consider how aesthetic achievement, ethical accountability, and institutional recognition intersect.
Building upon this framework, the second movement, “Horizons,” will map the designer’s recurring sources of inspiration—such as history, geography, art, storytelling, and performance—and unpack how he constructs the imaginative worlds in which meaning emerges not from any single source but from the relationships among them. The third movement, “Atlas of Transformation,” will trace Galliano’s creative process through his extraordinary research books, sketches, toiles, fittings, and finished garments, illuminating how his imaginative worlds acquire material form. By revealing the evolution from image to object, reference to realization, this gallery will provide insight into the creativity, craftsmanship, experimentation, and technical innovation that underpin his work.