It was announced on Friday evening that the theme of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s next fashion exhibition will be John Galliano: Horizons. The show is due to open on May 9, 2027, following the annual Met Gala. It makes Galliano the third designer to receive a solo Costume Institute exhibition while still alive, after Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo (though Miuccia Prada shared a joint exhibition with Elsa Schiaparelli in 2012).

According to The New York Times, the Costume Institute’s lead curator, Andrew Bolton, has been considering a Galliano exhibition since 2010, but only started developing it seriously in 2024 – the same year that the designer showed his critically adored Margiela Artisanal collection. Reports at the time suggested that a Galliano retrospective had been considered for 2024 but shelved amid concerns about a potential backlash, though Bolton now denies that the delay was caused by the designer’s past. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year that Kim Kardashian, Zendaya, Bad Bunny and Gwendoline Christie wore Galliano-designed Maison Margiela on the Met Gala red carpet, while Ariana Grande changed into one of his designs for her performance.

Essentially, this exhibition has been in the works for a while. It’s not pegged to a specific milestone or anniversary; it’s happening because Andrew Bolton and Anna Wintour believe the designer’s influence on fashion is “undeniable”. “There is no one more deserving of an exhibition of this scale than John Galliano,” said Wintour. However, regardless of his impact on fashion history, this exhibition was always going to be controversial. 

In February 2011, footage emerged of Galliano making racist and antisemitic comments at La Perle bar in Paris. Filmed the previous December, the video surfaced days after his arrest following a separate confrontation at the same venue. He was subsequently fired by Dior and convicted that September of making racist and antisemitic public insults. While exiled from the fashion industry, he went to rehab and worked with Rabbi Barry Marcus in London and Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League in New York to learn about Jewish history and antisemitism. In 2014, he returned to fashion as creative director of Margiela. While much of the fashion industry has welcomed him back, it comes as no surprise that next year’s exhibition has already sparked backlash. 

Anticipating that the exhibition would be met with controversy, Bolton has promised that its curation will not evade Galliano’s past. “Our responsibility is neither to celebrate uncritically nor avoid that difficult history, but establish the record honestly, provide context and create the conditions for visitors to make an informed judgment.”

Maybe it’s because Wintour and Bolton have been trying to get this retrospective over the line for several years that its timing now feels a little odd. Unlike the Met’s 1983 exhibition, Yves Saint Laurent: 25 Years of Design, Galliano’s retrospective doesn’t mark a specific moment, but it does arrive against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. So, why is it happening now? Its objective, like that of any good exhibition, will be to educate its visitors. But let’s not forget, it also needs to make money.

The Met might be taking us on a trip down memory lane, but it’s also tapping into something very current: nostalgia. Late last year, we published this article, in which we predicted that nostalgia would be the defining trend of the 2020s. “Kylie Jenner is back on Snapchat and using the name “King Kylie” again,” writes Eleni Leokadia. “You just scrolled past a TikTok of a fashion boy meandering about in an outfit only the mind of 2015 Jason Derulo could’ve assembled. The scroll continues, and a 2005 photo of Kate Moss at Glastonbury appears, illustrating the military jacket revival of 2025. It’s not long before you’re confronted by the 2006 “Hedi Boy”, lighting up a cigarette in archival Dior Homme.”

Not long after this article was published, we kicked off 2026 with countless Instagram dumps dedicated to 2016 and the people we were a decade ago. If you’re a fan of fashion (which, hopefully you are if you’re reading this article), your feed will have become increasingly clogged with forgotten runway moments from the 90s and 00s. 

Opening Instagram or TikTok in 2026 is to be reminded of the time Beyoncé walked for Tom Ford, Rihanna walked for Dsquared2 or Naomi Campbell fell over in her Vivienne Westwood platforms. Some of today’s most popular fashion influencers are the faceless figures behind archival accounts – take @mcqueen_vault, @thewestwoodarchives or @tomfordforgucci, for example.

The red carpet is leaning into nostalgia too. Celebrity stylists now come armed with crowbars, ready to break down the doors of every luxury fashion archive. They dust off rare pieces of fashion history and mould them to fit the narrative of whatever Hollywood blockbuster they’re promoting. But that’s a separate article (which you can read here). 

We look back on the runways of the past and moan that fashion will never be as good again. Maybe it won’t. Or maybe it’s just easy to romanticise those eras because their shows were shot on film and there were bigger budgets for theatrics. Either way, John Galliano is the epitome of fashion’s nostalgia. Few designers’ work is as readily romanticised or held in such high regard as his. And for good reason: the man is a creative genius.

From the clothes and set design to the way the models moved across the space, his shows were magic. That talent is central to the difficulty of this exhibition: the work can be extraordinary even when the man behind it remains impossible for many to forgive. Many of his fashion shows contain at least one moment that would go viral on social media today. Whether it’s Erin O’Connor climbing out of a carriage at Dior’s AW05 couture show, a steam train (the Diorient Express) pulling into Paris’ Gare d’Austerlitz, or Kate Moss playing the runaway Russian Princess Lucretia.

Maybe it’s because the future looks so bleak that we spend all our spare time looking to the past. However, we should be wary, as Leokadia writes: “An obsession with the past risks a kind of political inertia, diverting attention from the social issues of today and discouraging the formation of new ideas (in this sense, it’s the other side of the coin to AI, both recycling rather than creating, consuming what exists instead of engaging critically or imagining something new).” 

There is a strong case for exhibiting Galliano’s portfolio and confronting his contributions to fashion history. Whether deliberate or not, the exhibition is well positioned to benefit from a moment in which the industry has its head buried in the archives. Could next year’s Met Gala be the grand finale to the 2020’s love affair with nostalgia? Maybe a delicious, John Galliano feast for the eyes is exactly what we need to finally move on.