Only a handful of designers have ever been honored with Met Gala exhibitions exclusively devoted to their work: Cristóbal Balenciaga (1973), Yves Saint Laurent (1983), Paul Poiret (2007), Alexander McQueen (2011), Charles James (2014), Rei Kawakubo (2017), and Karl Lagerfeld (2023), as well as Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, who were the subject of a shared exhibition in 2012: Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations . Of those designers, only three were alive at the time of their exhibitions; Saint Laurent, Kawakubo, and Prada. And, until this week , it looked like John Galliano was fixing to joint their rarefied ranks in 2027. That is until backlash over the announcement of an exhibition honoring a man convicted of a hate crime in France for racist and antisemitic remarks reached a volume that was impossible for even Anna Wintour and the Met to ignore. That and the fact that, according to The New York Times , many of the museum’s top donors were threatening to pull their gifts.
So Galliano is out. That much is clear. But who is in? The next Met Gala and accompanying show are only eight months away. That’s not a lot of time for head curator Andrew Bolton and Mme. Wintour to pull together a whole new show from scratch. Maybe they will just try to beef up whatever was planned to go up after the ill-conceived Galliano retrospective, though that feels like it would be an exercise doomed to failure by poor attendance.
Of course if they still want to do a show devoted to the output of a single designer, we’ve got some ideas.
There is no denying the influence that Jacobs’ designs have had on fashion and culture over the span of his nearly 40-year career. From his headline-stealing grunge collection for Perry Ellis in 1992, to launching Louis Vuitton women’s wear in 1997 and the pioneering work he did in the realm of artist/fashion collaborations during his 16 years there, to his own eponymous brand and the creation of his massively successful diffusion brand, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Jacobs has been at the forefront of not just American fashion but the entire fashion industry for most of his life. Given that Jacobs spent so long at Louis Vuitton, LVMH seems like a shoe-in as a major sponsor, even if they did just sell his namesake brand to WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group in a $925 million. Surely they could afford to give some of that money to the Met to honor him. And Wintour could probably get G-III and WHP to pony up as well, after all, it would be great publicity for their new acquisition. And if the Met really wanted to make a mint, they could have Jacobs himself design the merch. People would go absolutely gaga for that.
People are obsessed with Tom Ford-era Gucci these days. And with good reason. The man revived a dying leather goods brand turning it into a true fashion powerhouse that defined late-’90s and early-’00s sex appeal. His relatively brief stint at (Yves) Saint Laurent, following the perhaps somewhat forced retirement of Saint Laurent himself, was incredibly creatively fruitful, as were his years at the helm of his own eponymous brand, which was acquired by The Estée Lauder Companies in 2023 for a staggering $2.8 billion. Wintour could probably get Estée and Kering to co-sponsor the exhibition and the fashion girlies would surely approve. And then there are the designer’s films. He’s only made two so far, but they were certainly very stylish and would be a…