The Met Announces The Costume Institute’s Spring 2027 Exhibition, extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday

Exhibition Dates: May 9, 2027–January 9, 2028
Member Previews: May 4, 6, 7, and 8, 2027

(New York, November 5, 2026)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today The Costume Institute’s spring 2027 exhibition, extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday, on view May 9, 2027, through January 9, 2028, at The Met Fifth Avenue.

Bringing together works from The Costume Institute’s collection with key loans and new acquisitions, the exhibition will explore how designers rework familiar garments, everyday objects, and commonplace materials through craft, construction, material experimentation, and conceptual wit. Even as designers transform these familiar things, their earlier functions, histories, and associations remain part of what gives the new designs meaning.

From jeans, T-shirts, and puffer coats, to paper, plastic, and metal, the exhibition will examine how design reveals unexpected possibilities within everyday things. It will also consider how wearing, styling, and caring for them shapes their significance over time.

The Costume Institute Benefit, also known as The Met Gala, will take place on Monday, May 3, 2027. Additional details for the event will be announced at a later date. The Gala is a fundraiser for The Met’s Costume Institute and provides the department with its primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and operations. The proceeds also support other Museum activities.

The exhibition and Benefit are made possible by Instagram.

Major funding is provided by Moncler.

Additional support is provided by Condé Nast.

Education programs presented in conjunction with the exhibition are made possible by Jordan Roth.

“Fashion offers an immediate and compelling way to look at the world,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “By bringing together works that begin with the clothes, objects, and materials of daily life, extraORDINARY invites visitors to discover the creativity and ingenuity in things they encounter every day. Combining The Costume Institute’s holdings with important loans and new acquisitions, the exhibition reveals the rich relationship between fashion, art, and everyday experience.”

“The ordinary is never quite as simple as it appears,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. “A pair of jeans, a white shirt, or a sweatshirt can hold traces of a life—the habits, memories, and attachments that make something our own. Designers work with that familiarity, revealing unexpected possibilities within forms and materials we think we already know. The exhibition invites us to discover how much imagination the everyday can hold, and how looking again might change what we value and care for.”

extraORDINARY will extend an inquiry begun in The Costume Institute’s current exhibition, , which places the dressed body at the center of aesthetic experience. Fashion’s intimacy with the body is fundamental to its significance as art: clothes are worn and lived in, shaping identity and encounters with others. The spring 2027 exhibition will pursue this inquiry through everyday life, asking how design brings renewed attention to familiar things and how their significance develops through use and care.

The exhibition will open with a gallery devoted to selected garments from Jun Takahashi’s autumn/winter 2024–25 collection for Undercover, Watching a Working Woman. Inspired in part by Wim Wenders’s film Perfect Days (2023), the collection’s runway presentation was accompanied by a poem written and read by Wenders about the daily life of a working mother. Familiar garments are joined and layered in ways that complicate their recognition, giving material expression to overlapping identities and responsibilities. The presentation will connect imaginative construction with the lived experience of getting dressed.

Two principal sections—“Familiar Forms” and “Common Matter”—will develop these ideas through focused comparisons of garment types, materials, and found objects. Recycling, upcycling, and reuse will recur throughout, connecting the reinterpretation of recognizable forms with the incorporation of things already made, used, or worn. These practices will invite consideration of how earlier uses remain present in new constructions, how value is reassigned, and what responsibilities accompany the production, use, and disposal of clothing.

“Familiar Forms” will examine how designers reinvent archetypal garments, from jeans and T-shirts to hoodies, biker jackets, trench coats, and puffers. Shaped by work, leisure, and protection, these garments constitute a shared vocabulary of everyday dress. Grouped by type, the works will reveal how changes in scale, proportion, material, construction, and context can unsettle the conventions that make each form recognizable. Comparisons across the groupings will explore how practical garments become expressions of identity, belonging, and dissent, revealing how designers engage meanings that have already been shaped by the people who wear the garments.

Examples from this section include a pair of 2022–23 jeans by Matthieu Blazy for Bottega Veneta; a 2006 shirt by Gianfranco Ferré; a 1993 flannel shirt by Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis; a 2011–12 biker jacket by Junya Watanabe; a 2022 ensemble by Jonathan Anderson for Loewe; and a 2019–20 ensemble by Moncler 1 Pierpaolo Piccioli.

“Common Matter” will explore how designers construct clothing from commonplace materials and recognizable objects. Three central groupings—paper, plastic, and metal—will reveal how physical properties and familiar uses become resources for invention through folding, cutting, joining, and assembly. Perimeter displays organized around Objects of Everyday Life, Objects of Everyday Adornment, and Objects of Everyday Dress will feature works incorporating objects such as cutlery, broken china, and buttons. Together, these works will examine how material properties, earlier functions, and histories of use remain active within new designs.

Highlights from this section include a 1992 dress by Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons; a 1992–93 ensemble by Martin Margiela; a 2003 jacket by Helmut Lang; a 1998–99 ensemble by Issey Miyake; and a 2027 dress by Glenn Martens for Maison Margiela.

The exhibition will close with selected garments from Kunihiko Morinaga’s collections for Anrealage from spring/summer 2009, autumn/winter 2009–10, autumn/winter 2020–21, and spring/summer 2021. Familiar garments constructed for unfamiliar geometries will explore assumptions about the bodies that clothing is intended to accommodate. Shirts, coats, and other recognizable forms acquire unexpected proportions and volumes when conceived in relation to cubes, spheres, and pyramids.

Presented in relation to geometric forms and the human body, the garments will reveal how fit depends on the relationship between a construction and the form it accommodates. They will invite visitors to consider how clothing accommodates bodily differences and how bodies, in turn, are expected to conform to clothing. Where Undercover’s opening presentation explores how clothes accommodate the demands of daily life, Anrealage’s closing presentation questions how they accommodate the body.

The exhibition design by 1009 will bring visitors’ own clothing into visual dialogue with the works on view, recognizing the creativity expressed through everyday wear and styling. Visitors will be invited to reconsider the significance of the clothes in which they arrive, reflecting on what familiar things already mean to them and what renewed attention might lead them to value and care for differently.

Credits
The exhibition is organized by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge, The Costume Institute, with the assistance of Costume Institute staff Stephanie Kramer, Senior Research Associate, and Emily Mushaben, Research Associate. Exhibition design is by 1009.

Programming
The Met will host a series of public programs and events that will explore various elements and themes presented in the exhibition. Further information will be released in 2027.

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November 5, 2026