Why Next Year's Met Gala Red Carpet Will Look Like a Designer's Greatest Hits
With the 2027 Met Gala reportedly built around John Galliano's career, the archival looks most likely to resurface are the ones that already broke the internet the first time.
Split image of a dramatic blue mermaid-silhouette couture gown on a runway beside a celebrity in a metallic bronze strapless gown with a bow detail on a red carpet · Photo: @maisonmargiela
A Met Gala built around a single designer's career turns the red carpet into something closer to a museum retrospective, and if the 2027 edition is genuinely centered on John Galliano, the archive it has to draw from is unusually deep. Few designers have produced as many single, instantly identifiable runway moments across as many eras.
His Dior years alone offer two completely different directions to reference. The 2004 fall/winter collection leaned into palace-scale drama — exaggerated proportions, heavy corsetry, embroidery dense enough to read as architecture rather than decoration. Three years later, the 2007 spring/summer collection went in almost the opposite direction, translating the folded geometry of Japanese paper-folding and kimono construction into pieces that looked engineered rather than sewn.
His more recent Maison Margiela work gives the red carpet an entirely different register to pull from: the 2024 spring/summer show pushed corsetry and proportion into genuinely distorted territory, while the 2018 collection worked in iridescent materials built specifically to catch and scatter camera flash — a detail that made those pieces, memorably, look different in every single photo taken of them. Rihanna's iridescent Margiela look from the 2018 Met Gala is the most obvious proof of how well that material choice translates to an actual red carpet rather than just a runway.
Whichever era ends up most referenced, the throughline across all of it is the same: Galliano's work was never built to be worn quietly, which is exactly what makes it Met Gala material in the first place.
