John Galliano will headline the Met's 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, Horizons, making him only the third living designer honoured this way. The show traces his rise at Dior and Margiela alongside his 2011 firing over antisemitic remarks, while a Zara archive partnership marks his latest chapter.
If you had to describe a fashion designer whose career had the highest highs and the lowest of lows imaginable, few living designers would make the cut the way John Galliano does.
On one hand, you have his collections that have, and undoubtedly will continue to, rank amongst the best in fashion history (the most recent example of this being his final bow at Maison Margiela with his Spring Summer '24 collection, Artisanal). On the other hand, you have that one video (and multiple other instances) of the intoxicated designer at a Parisian cafe in 2011, hurling antisemitic abuses and praising Adolf Hitler as horrified onlookers record the tirade on their devices. And then, of course, is his upcoming stint at Zara.
To say that Galliano is to fashion what Kanye West is to hip hop won't really be an understatement. And that too in an industry that has the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Alexander Wang, all of whom were forgiven (or not even criticised as much) for their racist remarks and sexual harassment charges.
Except that Ye still has to recover the kind of respect and support in the industry he enjoyed before that podcast (and his actions don't seem like he will get there in the near future). But Galliano, in roughly fifteen years since the Paris incident cost him the top job at Dior, seems to have made a full comeback.
Just today, the Met's Costume Institute has confirmed that its 2027 exhibition will be dedicated to Galliano, titled John Galliano: Horizons. It opens May 9, 2027 and runs through January 9, 2028, at the Met's Fifth Avenue home, and it will serve as the theme for next year's Met Gala, though the dress code and co-chairs haven't been announced yet.
With this honour, he becomes only the third living designer to receive a solo show at the Met, after Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 and Rei Kawakubo in 2017. Every other Costume Institute retrospective on an individual designer, including Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty and Karl Lagerfeld's A Line of Beauty, has come posthumously.
As I said before, Galliano is undisputedly an intergenerational talent. His 1984 graduation show at Central Saint Martins, Les Incroyables, launched a career built on historical romanticism and technical bravado.
He famously popularised the bias cut, a technique where fabrics are cut diagonally across the weave, instead of straight up and down. Givenchy brought him into the luxury fold, before Dior made him the creative director in October 1996, a post he held for nearly fifteen years.
To watch a Galliano show is like watching an excited child's imagination of what it is like to live across time and cultures. And I mean this in the best way possible. It's a world of pirates and pharaohs, of women from Renaissance sculptures and dockboys on shady roads. There is also an undercurrent of exoticism in many of his collections, but you could argue that they are also what made his runways all the more fascinating.
And then came the footage. A Paris court later convicted him of public insults based on race, religion, ethnicity and national origin, resulting in a fine and an order to cover damages and court costs. Dior fired him immediately, and the designer stepped away from public life for roughly two years afterwards.
He then resurfaced in 2014 as creative director of Maison Margiela, where he spent a decade reinvigorating the house's Artisanal line before departing in 2024 on the back of a widely acclaimed Spring/Summer Artisanal collection.
Galliano has since spoken about alcoholism and drug dependency as the backdrop to that period in 2011. His rehabilitation into the industry included meetings with Jewish community leaders and rabbis, and engagement with organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, a process well documented through a feature-length documentary made about his comeback.
After the kind of success he has garnered, especially in the last few years, it was only a matter of time till the Met made this announcement.
Of course, the Met has stated explicitly that the show is not meant to offer "a conventional narrative of disgrace and redemption," but to examine how aesthetic achievement, ethical accountability and institutional recognition intersect.
"John Galliano has exerted a profound influence on fashion over the past four decades," said Max Hollein, the Met's director and CEO, in a statement announcing the show.
The exhibition will unfold across three sections. Bearings traces Galliano within the cultural context that shaped him: 1980s London, club culture, and the post-punk scene around Central Saint Martins. Horizons traces his recurring sources of inspiration, from geography and art to performance and literature. Atlas of Transformation opens up his process itself, through research books, sketches, toiles and fittings that show how an idea becomes a finished garment. A catalogue written by curator Andrew Bolton (who organises the exhibition every year), published by the Met and distributed internationally through Yale University Press, will accompany the show.
The Met announcement comes just months after Galliano's other major move of 2026: a two-year creative partnership with Zara, announced in March. Under the deal, he's "re-authoring" the retailer's archive, working directly with garments from past seasons and reworking them into new pieces, a process Zara has described as deconstruction and reconfiguration rather than design from scratch. The first collection is due in stores this September, with further releases planned twice yearly,
Says a lot about the fashion industry, it does. But from time immemorial, art-versus-artist has been the chicken-and-egg question of the industry. And unlike other designers who, time and again, have shown no remorse for their actions and still continue to be in the limelight, John Galliano at least appears to be apologetic for his past.
That alone is more than enough, it seems.