All hell broke loose at the end of August, weeks after Anna Wintour announced that John Galliano would be the “theme” of next year’s Met Gala. It all fell apart in spectacular fashion, with Jewish leaders pulling rank and going over Wintour’s head to the museum and to the sponsors. By the last day of August, Galliano pulled out of the Costume Institute exhibition and the Met Gala theme. Since then, the vibe has been that Anna Wintour is quietly fuming and trying to figure out how she got it so wrong. For months, Wintour didn’t bother to make any kind of announcements about what the new gala theme would be. Well, this week, Vogue announced the new theme, and Wintour is nowhere to be found in this piece:

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.”

He was drawn in particular to the Japanese designer Jun Takahashi’s fall 2024 Undercover collection, a sublimely moving show that was inspired by Wim Wenders’s contemplative film about the beauty of everyday life, Perfect Days, and included a spoken poem specially written for the occasion by the director about the daily rituals of a single mother, “Watching a Working Woman.” Garments from Takahashi’s collection—otherwise unremarkable pieces reworked via collage and layering techniques that rendered them anything but prosaic—will greet visitors at the entrance to “extraORDINARY.” They “give the exhibition a real human starting point,” Bolton says.

The show will close with the work of another Japanese designer, Anrealage’s Kunihiko Morinaga, whose “unfamiliar geometries” and “unexpected proportions” add a conceptual dimension to what is otherwise familiar. Rain parkas and trench coats as “objects of wonder.”

In between, “Familiar Forms” will look more closely at designers’ interventions of common items—Virgil Abloh’s Off-White t-shirts, Gianfranco Ferré’s demonstrative white shirts, trenches from Jonathan Anderson at Loewe and “the different designers at Burberry,” and puffer gowns from Pierpaolo Piccioli’s collections for Moncler all of which, one way of the other, “put the extra in the ordinary,” Bolton says.

[From Vogue]

This is such a dog-ate-my-homework ass theme. “I dunno, maybe, like, elevated t-shirts? Parkas? Garbage bags?” What’s crazy is that the moment Bob Mackie died (September 14), pretty much everyone said that Mackie should be posthumously honored with a Costume Institute exhibition and that Mackie’s designs and aesthetic would be perfect for the gala’s theme. Did Wintour not hear any of that? Did Andrew Bolton just think “no, I’ve got it, T-SHIRTS!” All of this to say, next year’s Met Gala is going to be ass.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.