Best Fashion Exhibitions in 2027: From Viktor&Rolf to McQueen

McQueen Black Duck Feather will be on show in San Francisco

Fashion wasn’t always a major museum draw. For much of the twentieth century, costume exhibitions tended to sit at the margins of museum programming, attracting specialists rather than the crowds that flocked to painting shows. That changed decisively in 2011, when Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty drew more than 661,500 visitors to the Met, making it the Costume Institute’s most-visited exhibition at the time. Fashion has since proved capable of drawing blockbuster audiences: Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination attracted 1.66 million visitors to the Met in 2018, while Louvre Couture brought more than 1.05 million people to the Louvre in 2025, the second-highest attendance for an exhibition in the museum’s history.

The change has been about more than visitor numbers. Fashion exhibitions are moving beyond the familiar designer retrospective to look at how clothes are made, collected, worn and interpreted. Some focus on the influence of literature and music; others examine the history of textiles or the work involved in preserving garments. Museums are increasingly treating fashion not as an isolated category, but as part of a wider cultural history.

The 2027 calendar reflects that range. Paris has a Viktor&Rolf retrospective, a 50th-anniversary exhibition at the Palais Galliera and the expected reopening of the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris. San Francisco and Antwerp take different approaches to Azzedine Alaïa, while London’s exhibitions turn to literature and the music cultures that shaped British style. In Dundee, jewellery takes centre stage in a show devoted to Vivienne Westwood.

PARIS

Le monde de Viktor&Rolf. 30 ans de haute couture

Musée des Arts Décoratifs | 28 January – 4 July 2027

Viktor&Rolf have often treated couture as a vehicle for ideas rather than simply a way to make beautiful clothes. Their work includes exaggerated, Russian-doll proportions, dresses bearing slogans and collections that play with the conventions of the runway. This retrospective brings together more than 100 creations from the Dutch duo’s three-decade career, alongside miniature dolls, archival material and projections.

The themes range from Fashion Statements to their work in performance, fragrance and upcycling. Recent runway collections will also be shown in a museum for the first time. The exhibition was conceived by curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot in collaboration with the designers at Munich’s Kunsthalle before travelling to Paris.

Paris: a museum anniversary and a reopening

The Palais Galliera will mark 50 years as Paris’s fashion museum with Lucy McKenzie: La mode rêvée, running from 24 April to 18 July 2027. The Scottish artist has been invited to work with the museum’s collections and history, turning attention to the ways clothing is preserved and displayed. The collection began with 2,000 costumes donated by Maurice Leloir in 1920 and now contains more than 200,000 items.

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris is also scheduled to reopen in autumn 2027 after renovation work that began in May 2025. The project is expected to double the public exhibition space, improve access to historic rooms including Pierre Bergé’s office, and introduce a documentation and research centre.

SAN FRANCISCO

Azzedine Alaïa: Sculpting Fashion

Legion of Honor | 21 November 2026 – 11 April 2027

Alaïa’s clothes are known for the precision with which they follow and shape the body. This retrospective looks at the cutting, fitting and construction behind that effect, alongside garments from his career and historic couture from his personal collection. The latter will include work by Cristóbal Balenciaga, Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet.

Alaïa trained in sculpture before moving into fashion, but his reputation rests as much on technical discipline as on sculptural form. The exhibition brings those strands together, with the clothes showing how small decisions in cut and construction can alter a silhouette.

Dior to McQueen: Fashioning Form

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | 15 May – 7 September 2027

SFMOMA will stage its first major fashion exhibition since its 1983 retrospective of Issey Miyake, bringing 45 designers into conversation with 15 sculptors.

Dior to McQueen: Fashioning Form opens with Christian Dior’s 1947 Bar suit, its sharply defined waist and full skirt paired with Louise Bourgeois’s Persistent Antagonism, a sculpture from the same year that abstracts the human figure into a few spare shapes. Elsewhere, John Chamberlain’s towering sculpture of crushed, folded steel is shown alongside fashion that experiments with pleating and compression, from Madame Grès’s sculptural gowns to Glenn Martens’s work for Maison Margiela Artisanal in 2025. The exhibition runs from postwar couture to contemporary experiments with materials, construction and wearable technology.

ANTWERP

Azzedine Alaïa. The Eye of the Collector

MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp | 20 March – 25 July 2027

Alaïa collected clothes with the same close attention he brought to making them. His personal collection included work by Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Madame Grès, designers whose handling of fabric and construction held particular interest for him. This exhibition places those pieces alongside his own work, examining the relationship between collecting, patternmaking and the technical knowledge passed between generations of couturiers.

Guest-curated by Olivier Saillard with MoMu curator Romy Cockx, the show runs concurrently with the final weeks of the Alaïa retrospective in San Francisco. Both draw on his collection, but Antwerp puts the garments he studied and preserved closer to the centre of the story.

LONDON

Characters of Fashion

Barbican Art Gallery | 15 April – 29 August 2027

Clothing can reveal a fictional character’s social position or inner life; an author’s own wardrobe can become part of their public identity. Characters of Fashion explores both, bringing garments and accessories together with letters, diaries, manuscripts and photography. Its literary figures range from Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf to James Baldwin and Zadie Smith.

Designers represented will include Dior, Erdem, Dries Van Noten, Prada, Comme des Garçons, Simone Rocha and Robert Wun. A reading room curated by writer and curator Lou Stoppard completes the exhibition.

Punk to Pop

V&A South Kensington | 13 March 2027 – 2 January 2028

Between 1972 and 1985, punk’s DIY ethos helped reshape British music and fashion, alongside the emergence of New Romanticism and other creative scenes. The V&A places the period against a backdrop of austerity, political unrest and technological change, with an emphasis on the exchange between music and dress.

The exhibition looks at how style became a means of self-expression and resistance, from handmade punk clothing to the more theatrical looks associated with later scenes. It covers a period when music, graphics and fashion were increasingly bound together in the creation of new identities.

DUNDEE

Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery

V&A Dundee | Opens 26 March 2027

Making its UK debut in Dundee, this exhibition brings together four decades of jewellery from Vivienne Westwood’s archive and runway collections. Westwood used jewellery to carry historical references, challenge convention and sharpen the character of a look. The pieces will be displayed alongside garments, images and video, including archive looks reflecting the house’s connection to Scottish textiles and culture.

Jewellery has sometimes been treated as an accessory to the main event in fashion exhibitions. Here, it is the subject, with the archive tracing how Westwood used smaller objects to convey the same mix of historical reference, punk attitude and theatricality found in her clothes.