Met plans first major John Galliano exhibition, confronting his scandalous past
The Met is giving John Galliano his first major museum show, and it will confront the antisemitic, racist and anti-Asian conduct that derailed his ascent.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced John Galliano: Horizons on July 31, 2026, setting a spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition around one of fashion’s most electrifying and divisive names. The show will open at The Met Fifth Avenue on May 9, 2027 and run through January 9, 2028 in The Condé M. Nast Galleries, Great Hall Gallery 099, Ground Floor, making it the first major museum exhibition devoted to Galliano.
That is a sharp institutional bet. The Met is not only canonizing a designer famous for feverish silhouettes, corseted drama and historical reference points that made runway dressing feel like theater again. It is also putting his name back into the museum spotlight while the exhibition is set to address his antisemitic, racist and anti-Asian conduct, the scandal that blew apart his career and still shadows the way his work is discussed.
The scale of the honor is part of the story. Galliano will be only the third living designer ever to anchor a Costume Institute exhibition, which places him in an extremely small club and tells you how seriously the museum is treating his influence. The spring 2027 show will cover four decades of work across Dior, Givenchy, Maison Margiela and his own label, a span that lets the Met trace the full arc from young avant-gardist to house-defining spectacle machine.
That range matters because Galliano’s best-known eras do not all look the same. The Met’s own collection text identifies him as a British designer born in Gibraltar in 1960, and it already holds pieces from his spring-summer 1994 Princess Lucretia collection, including a bias-cut evening dress and a Japonism-inspired cocoon coat. Those pieces pull from the Romanovs, Anna Karenina, The Piano and Madeleine Vionnet, which is exactly the kind of obsessive, cinematic reference stack that made Galliano such a force at Dior and beyond.
The Costume Institute has more than 33,000 objects spanning seven centuries of fashion, and it has used that breadth to build big spring exhibitions before, including Costume Art in 2026 and Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology in 2016. Horizons pushes that machine into trickier territory: it will celebrate one of fashion’s most gifted image-makers while forcing the museum to decide how much scandal can be folded into legacy before legacy starts looking like a soft landing.
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