Exhibition Dates: May 9, 2027–January 9, 2028
Exhibition Location: The Met Fifth Avenue, The Condé M. Nast Galleries, Great Hall Gallery 099, Ground Floor
(New York, July 31, 2026)—The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today John Galliano: Horizons, the spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition and the first major museum show to 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.
“John Galliano has exerted a profound influence on fashion over the past four decades,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “His work brings historical inquiry, artistic imagination, theatrical expression, and technical experimentation into dynamic relation. Drawing upon the depth of The Costume Institute’s scholarship and the breadth of The Met’s collections, John Galliano: Horizons will offer an expansive examination of his creative practice while attending closely to the historical, cultural, and ethical circumstances through which his work is understood.”
The exhibition is organized by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute, a leading authority on contemporary fashion, who has written extensively on Galliano’s career and presented his works in numerous exhibitions over many years. Bolton stated, “Every Galliano collection begins as a journey among things separated by time, place, or medium: portrait and posture, silhouette and story, memory and material. Horizons approaches fashion as a form of cartography, mapping not territories but affinities, tensions, and transformations. It traces how images become ideas, ideas become material, and material becomes emotion. Yet a horizon reveals not only what lies before us, but also where we stand. The exhibition therefore considers both 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 exhibition will be organized into three “movements”: “Bearings,” “Horizons,” and “Atlas of Transformation.” 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. Through this lens, Galliano’s collections operate as acts of creative interpretation that expand the possibilities of fashion as a cultural and artistic practice.
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.
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 by 1009.
Related Content
An illustrated catalogue written by Bolton will accompany the show. The book will be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed internationally by Yale University Press.
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July 31, 2026