Dawn Images

If you followed the Met Gala earlier this year, you might remember Indian model Bavitha Mandava, the 26-year-old who showed up to fashion’s biggest night in a quarter-zip sweater and a pair of jeans.

Well, maybe she was a time traveller from next year’s gala, because the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) announced the revised theme for the Costume Institute’s Spring 2027 exhibition and Mandava would have fit right in.

The new theme is extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday.

The change in theme follows two months of uncertainty after the original was scrapped following intense backlash. The exhibition was initially supposed to chronicle the career of controversial British designer John Galliano.

The Galliano theme was not received well in the fashion community, largely due to the way the former Dior designer’s career collapsed following two incidents of racist and anti-semitic abuse in 2010 and 2011 that landed him in legal trouble.

A press release from the Met says, “The exhibition will explore how designers rework familiar garments, everyday objects, and commonplace materials through craft, construction, material experimentation, and conceptual wit.”

The exhibition, which will feature 230 pieces of clothing, will open with a gallery devoted to selected garments from Jun Takahashi’s Fall/Winter 2024–25 collection for Undercover titled Watching a Working Woman.

Two principal sections — ‘Familiar Forms’ and ‘Common Matter’ — will develop these ideas through focused comparisons of garment types, materials, and found objects.

‘Familiar forms’ will explore how designers reinvent common types of clothing, like t-shirts, jeans, trench coats and biker jackets. ‘Common Matter’ will look at the incorporation of everyday materials and household items into fashion, with three central groupings: paper, plastic and metal.

Speaking to journalists, the museum’s curator-in-charge Andrew Bolton said he didn’t have a plan B after the Galliano theme was scrapped. For the new theme, he said he “wanted it to be as challenging and as provocative and as beautiful as a John show would have been”.

The museum said details of the annual Met Gala, which is scheduled for May 3, will be revealed in time.