The countdown to the Met Gala is officially on, with just eight months to go until fashion’s biggest night returns on May 3, 2027. As always, the evening will celebrate the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring exhibition, this year devoted to the work of John Galliano. From the theme to the co-hosts, here’s everything you need to know about the Met Gala 2027.

When is the Met Gala 2027?

Following the Met Gala on May 3, which provides the Costume Institute with its primary source of funding for all activities, “John Galliano: Horizons” will be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 9, 2027 through January 9, 2028.

What is the Met Gala 2027 theme?

The Costume Institute’s spring 2027 exhibition will take John Galliano as its subject. Only the third living designer to be honored with a retrospective at the Met—the first was Yves Saint Laurent in 1983; the second was Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons in 2017—“John Galliano: Horizons,” organized by Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute Andrew Bolton, will span his years as Central Saint Martins’s enfant terrible; his formative appointment at Givenchy; his phenomenal success and, later, dramatic downfall at Christian Dior after making antisemitic remarks at a Paris bar; and, finally, his reinvention of Maison Margiela. The show will draw extensively on the garments, accessories, sketches, toiles, research books, and archival material from the Costume Institute’s world-beating collection of the designer’s work.

“Every Galliano collection begins as a journey among things separated by time, place, or medium: portrait and posture, silhouette and story, memory and material,” Bolton said in a release. “‘Horizons’ approaches fashion as a form of cartography, mapping not territories but affinities, tensions, and transformations. It traces how images become ideas, ideas become material, and material becomes emotion. Yet a horizon reveals not only what lies before us,” Bolton continued, “but also where we stand. The exhibition therefore considers both how Galliano has remapped the world through fashion and how his conduct, its consequences, and changing cultural values have reshaped our understanding of his work.”

Anna Wintour, Chief Content Officer, Condé Nast, Global Editorial Director, Vogue added: “There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano. His body of work—at Dior, Givenchy, Margiela, his namesake label and more—combines erudition and creativity, darkness and light, the past, the present, the future all smashing together brilliantly. He’s a great designer and his career isn’t defined by a moment—something that he will live with for the rest of his life. The exhibition won’t shy away from any of the darkness in John’s past. It’s part of what has shaped him. The show will take in the full arc of his career and grapple with all of it.”

What was the Met Gala 2026 theme?

Inaugurating the Met’s new, nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries, the spring 2026 show, “Costume Art,” considers depictions of the dressed body from across the Met’s curatorial departments, pairing garments with art objects spanning some 5,000 years.

Objects in “Costume Art” are divided into a “series of thematic body types,” ranging from the “Naked Body” and the “Classical Body”—both of which are well represented within the museum’s collection—to those, like the “Pregnant Body” and the “Aging Body,” that have more often been overlooked. It remains on view at the Met through January 10, 2027.