Met Gala exhibit will examine everyday items of clothing

NEW YORK (AP):

And now, Take 2: The new Met Gala exhibit will celebrate everyday garments and materials like jeans and puffer jackets, paper and plastic — and how fashion designers transform them.

The new theme announced Thursday sounds about as far as can be imagined from the glittering, elaborate designs of John Galliano, the British designer originally slated to be the subject of the Met’s fashion exhibit next spring, before that idea was scuttled amid an outcry over past antisemitic statements.

The replacement show at the Met’s Costume Institute, ‘extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday’, will be launched by the 2027 Met Gala, held traditionally on the first Monday in May. Using items in the museum’s collection, as well as loans and acquisitions, the exhibit aims to explore “how designers rework familiar garments, everyday objects, and commonplace materials through craft, construction, material experimentation, and conceptual wit,” the museum says.

When the original exhibit was cancelled, there was ‘no Plan B’

It is being assembled, as always, by the institute’s head curator, Andrew Bolton. The idea had to come together quickly once the museum, along with Galliano himself, decided to cancel the scandal-plagued retrospective under pressure from donors, city officials and the Jewish community.

In an interview this week, Bolton described the challenge of coming up with a new idea from scratch after the cancellation of the Galliano show. The institute had already been collecting Galliano designs for the original show, which had been announced with fanfare in late July. The museum had promised to confront the British designer’s “derogatory conduct that fundamentally altered his career and public reception”, a reference to past antisemitic and racist statements. A month later, the show was scrapped entirely.

“I had no Plan B, to be honest,” Bolton said. “There wasn’t another exhibition already researched and ready to go.” He said the new idea had occurred to him while he was working on last year’s show, ‘Costume Art’, but had remained merely “a twinkle in my eye”.

That previous show, he said, “sort of led me to think more about how we experience clothing in everyday life, obviously through wearing it, but (also) through memory and movement”.

“Everyday clothes carry extraordinary amounts of meaning,” Bolton said. “We have a favourite T-shirt, we have a favourite pair of jeans, and we wear them until they literally fall apart. And those meanings develop through wearing.”

The show looks at how designers make these garments into something different and unique. “I like the idea that designers turn these familiar things into these incredible sources of wonder,” he said.

The Met Gala’s hosts and dress code will be announced at a later date.

The spring exhibit is launched each year by the starry Met Gala, a fundraiser for the museum’s Costume Institute, where guests tour the show during cocktail hour. The most visible and photographed event on the fashion calendar is a much-coveted invite, drawing a mix of luminaries from the worlds of entertainment, business, sports and politics.

The exhibit’s theme influences the evening’s dress code, which will be announced at a later date, as will the newest slate of celebrity hosts for the May 3 gala.

lifestyle@gleanerjm.com