The Met's Next Fashion Exhibition Will Turn Everyday Clothes Into Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the theme of its next blockbuster fashion exhibition, and this time the stars are not ball gowns or royal robes. They are the clothes hanging in your wardrobe right now.

extraORDINARY: Fashion and the Poetics of the Everyday will run from 9 May 2027 to 9 January 2028 at The Met Fifth Avenue, with the famous Met Gala fundraiser set for Monday 3 May 2027.

Seeing the everyday anew

Organised by Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute's curator in charge, the exhibition explores how designers rework familiar garments and everyday materials through craft, construction, material experimentation and conceptual wit. Even after radical transformation, the museum notes, a garment's original function and history remain part of what gives it meaning.

The show unfolds in two principal sections. Familiar Forms looks at archetypal clothes such as jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, biker jackets, trench coats and puffer coats. Common Matter turns to humble materials including paper, plastic and metal, and how they can become wearable art. Ideas of recycling, upcycling and reuse run throughout.

From the museum's own rails

More than 200 pieces will go on display, roughly a third drawn from the Costume Institute's own collection alongside key loans and new acquisitions. The exhibition opens with selected garments from Jun Takahashi's Undercover autumn/winter 2024-25 collection, Watching a Working Woman.

Bolton hopes visitors leave looking differently at the clothes they arrived in, "with a greater sense of what is worth noticing, valuing, and caring for."

A gala with a twist

The Met Gala, the museum's glittering annual fundraiser, will take its cue from the theme, raising the delicious possibility of denim and T-shirts on fashion's most famous red carpet. The dress code itself is still to be announced.

It is a charming idea at heart: a reminder that creativity does not always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it is folded neatly in a drawer, waiting to be seen anew.