Love jeans and t-shirts? This one’s for you.
Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition and Met Gala will be devoted to familiar garments and commonplace materials rendered remarkable via the interventions of designers. Organized by Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton, with assistance from Stephanie Kramer and Emily Mushaben, the Met Gala 2027 theme, “extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday,” will ask its visitors “to see the everyday anew.” It will come at its subject from two directions, one focusing on the elevation of archetypal garments, i.e. the above-mentioned tees and jeans, and the the other examining how humble, even “disposable” materials, from paper to aluminum to plastic, are transformed into wearable art.
The exhibition replaces the John Galliano blockbuster originally planned for 2027 that was subsequently canceled after it became a cultural flashpoint.
“I didn’t have a plan B,” Bolton says candidly. “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. I wanted it to be as challenging and as provocative and as beautiful as a John show would have been.” He continues: “That was really important to me: to come up with an idea that wasn’t a substitute. And it had to have some sort of contemporary resonance.”
Bolton went back to “Costume Art,” the Costume Institute’s 2026 show as a starting point. That exhibition “placed the dressed body at the center of aesthetic experience,” he says, “and I suppose it led me to think more about how we experience clothing in everyday life through habit and touch and movement and sensation.”
