Two months after bowing to public pressure and postponing its planned Costume Institute exhibition for 2027, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a new fashion extravaganza in the works, one that involves going back to basics. Literally.
Rather than staging a couture fantasia dedicated to the wild imaginings of the designer John Galliano, the original theme, the Costume Institute will devote its next blockbuster exhibition to showcasing the … well, ordinary. Or as the title has it, the “extraOrdinary: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday.”
Think bluejeans, puffer jackets and white T-shirts — even paper, plastic and Bubble Wrap — reimagined through the lens of high fashion.
On the surface, such items seem deliberately uncontentious and a clear contrast with the Galliano show, which set off a firestorm of criticism after it was revealed in The New York Times. Donors and museum supporters rebelled against the choice because of the designer’s history of antisemitic remarks, seeing it as unnecessarily provocative given the political environment, and Galliano withdrew in late August.
The episode was also a public relations fiasco for Anna Wintour, the Met board member and global editorial director of Vogue, whose fund-raising prowess and longtime support of Galliano raised concerns in philanthropic circles about the influence of a donor in programming decisions.
Compared with that, denim and plain cotton look pretty benign — even unifying. After all, pretty much everyone wears them. Yet this show could incite some controversy of its own.
“The cancellation of the Galliano show was disappointing for everyone involved,” said Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, speaking publicly for the first time since the Galliano debacle.
In its place, he said: “I wanted an exhibition that I felt had something new to say, and that I felt was relevant to different conversations. I committed myself to this really quickly because it brings up ideas of value and consumption and resourcefulness and makes us question what we overlook and what we discard.”
Bolton said the new exhibition was not a Plan B that he had developed alongside the Galliano show. (He had not had one of those.) Nor, he said, had the museum insisted on something intentionally safe or considered postponing or skipping a new show.
“That would have probably been the most sensible thing,” Bolton said. “But in all honesty, working on a brand-new show was also a nice way of taking my mind off things. Obviously, the timetable was challenging.”
Bolton said he saw the new exhibition as a sequel of sorts to the current “Costume Art” show in that each focuses on how clothes are worn.
The exhibition will include 200 to 230 pieces, about 30 to 40 percent of which derive from the museum’s own collection, with the rest donated or lent by fashion brands. It will showcase items like Charles James’s 1930s couture puffer coat, pieces from Marc Jacobs’s 1990s Perry Ellis grunge collection and Brooke Shields’s Calvin Klein jeans — the ones from the famous ad.
Also, Junya Watanabe’s iteration of the leather biker jacket in the tradition of Dior’s New Look, Matthieu Blazy’s trompe l’oeil jeans for Bottega Veneta (the ones that looked like denim but were actually made of leather) and pieces upcycled, recycled and otherwise remade.
In other words, it will be both fabulous and mundane. And therein lies the rub. Just as such garments are part of communal history, their appropriation by the fashion world is often dismissed or even repudiated by viewers, who are scandalized by the idea of rendering a “flannel” shirt in cashmere and thus making it inaccessible.
Bolton acknowledged this could be an issue. “Obviously we all recognize that making do out of necessity and that choosing resourcefulness as an artistic method can involve similar techniques but very different circumstances,” he said. “That will be addressed in the exhibition for sure.”
The fact that the museum announced the new exhibition quietly via a news release on Thursday morning, rather than the bells and whistles of its usual celebrity-filled news conference, reflects the rush to get a second choice ready after the Galliano show went off the rails. As does the fact that there are currently no plans for an accompanying catalog.
Bolton said that he and Max Hollein, the director and chief executive of the Met, had numerous meetings to settle on the new theme and that Wintour played no role in the selection. (Still, she has her own history of merging the designer and the everyday. In her first issue as the editor of Vogue, in 1988, Wintour shocked the fashion world by placing the model Michaela Bercu on the cover wearing $50 Guess jeans with a $10,000 Christian Lacroix jeweled jacket.)
On hearing of the new exhibition, Julie Menin, the speaker of the New York City Council and the city’s first elected official to speak out against the Galliano plans, called it “an inclusive theme we can all get behind.”
The exhibition is set to open on the expected date, May 9, with the Met Gala taking place, as usual, the Monday before.
The gala had become part of the original brouhaha. Donors were worried that it might be perceived as celebrating Galliano, and it seemed particularly problematic that it fell on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. There was talk for a while of postponing it and even calls for its cancellation.
The “extraOrdinary” show, as well as the gala, will be sponsored by Instagram as its parent company, Meta, continues to woo the fashion world. (Instagram was also the lead sponsor in 2021 and 2022.) Moncler will also support the show, as will Condé Nast.
The celebrity co-hosts for the gala have not been announced; the party’s dress code is also still secret. Bolton said he hoped visitors to the show would wear their own versions of jeans, T-shirts and puffers.
“I want visitors to leave looking differently at the clothes they arrived in,” he said. “With a greater sense of what is worth noticing, valuing and caring for.”
It might be a hint. A dress-down Met Gala? It could happen.
The post The Met Has a New Gala Theme, and It Is as Uncontroversial as Possible appeared first on New York Times.
