The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced John Galliano: Horizons, the Spring 2027 exhibition at The Costume Institute and the first major museum survey spanning the full breadth of the British designer’s career. On view from May 9th, 2027, to January 9th, 2028, at The Met Fifth Avenue in New York, the exhibition brings together garments, accessories, sketches, toiles, research books, and archival material, offering an unprecedented look inside the creative world of one of fashion’s most influential designers.
Drawing extensively from The Costume Institute’s collection—the world’s largest holding of Galliano’s work—the exhibition traces his journey from his groundbreaking 1984 Central Saint Martins graduation collection through Givenchy, Christian Dior, and Maison Margiela, culminating in the acclaimed Spring/Summer 2024 collection.
Fashion as a landscape of memory and imagination
Moving beyond the format of a conventional retrospective, John Galliano: Horizons examines how the designer draws on history, literature, geography, performance, and visual culture to create richly layered collections. Fashion emerges as an artistic language where ideas from different eras, places, and disciplines collide to produce unexpected new narratives.
The exhibition also confronts Galliano’s complicated legacy, acknowledging the antisemitic, racist, and anti-Asian remarks that led to his dismissal from Christian Dior and his eponymous label in 2011. It considers how public memory, shifting cultural values, and institutional perspectives continue to shape perceptions of his work, encouraging visitors to reflect on the relationship between artistic achievement, personal accountability, and cultural recognition.
As Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, notes, “John Galliano has exerted a profound influence on fashion over the past four decades. His work brings historical inquiry, artistic imagination, theatrical expression, and technical experimentation into dynamic relation.”
Three movements trace John Galliano’s creative universe
Organised by Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, the exhibition is structured around three complementary sections.
Bearings follows Galliano’s career through key historical and cultural moments, while also examining the events that transformed his public life and their continuing impact on the reception of his work.
Horizons explores the designer’s vast constellation of influences, revealing how history, art, geography, theatre, and storytelling converge within his collections to create entirely new visual worlds.
The concluding section, Atlas of Transformation, focuses on Galliano’s creative process. Research books, sketches, toiles, fittings, and finished garments reveal how ideas evolve into couture, highlighting the craftsmanship, experimentation, technical innovation, and narrative thinking that define his practice.
Andrew Bolton on mapping fashion beyond the garment
Describing the exhibition’s conceptual framework, Andrew Bolton views fashion as a continuous process of transformation rather than a finished object.
“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.”
More than a celebration of Galliano’s creative vision, John Galliano: Horizons examines fashion’s capacity to shape cultural memory while prompting conversations about creativity, ethics, and history. It stands among the most anticipated fashion exhibitions of 2027, offering a thoughtful perspective on one of the industry’s most influential—and debated—designers.
