The Met Gala Needs a New Theme. We Vote for Dolly Parton.

01.09.2026, 18:22 allure.com

Yesterday John Galliano bowed out of the Met Costume Institute’s 2027 “John Galliano: Horizons” theme as the museum faced intense backlash to its decision to bestow such a high honor on a fashion designer with a history of antisemitic and racist outbursts. (In 2011, Galliano was found guilty in France of “public insults” based on origin, religion, race or ethnicity.)

May Allure suggest an alternative? It’s someone who was never caught on a camera or a hot mic saying anything remotely negative or judgmental about another person or group. Someone who chose, again and again, to use the financial fruits of her incredible talent to give back. And someone whose motivation in her fashion and beauty choices was to create a character, to have fun, and to spread joy. And a spectacle of unabashed, unpretentious joy sounds pretty good right about now doesn’t it?

Last week, Valerie Monroe wrote a story for Allure about Dolly’s great natural beauty. Yes, she wore heavy makeup and towering wigs and embraced plastic surgery, but her authenticity was undeniable. Her physical transformation, wrote Monroe, “was playful, creative, an exercise in extravagance, a loving tribute to the ‘trashy’ character she wanted to be.” Dolly often told the story of encountering her style icon as a little girl—she happened to be “the town tramp.” And Dolly never wavered in her commitment to that image.

Feathers, fringes, plunging necklines, skin-tight fabrics, generous handfuls of rhinestones, Dolly Parton had no use for “quiet luxury” and rejected everything “clean girl beauty” stands for. She went big, always, and liked to remind us that she never cut costs: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” But don’t forget the first dazzling adornment of Dolly Parton’s life: her “Coat of Many Colors,” sewed from rags by her mother with deep love and worn with great pride. (Vanessa Friedman wrote in the New York Times last week that American Songwriter named the coat of many colors one of the three most famous pieces of clothing in song. The others? Prince’s raspberry beret and Elvis’s blue suede shoes.) Dolly understood the memory and emotion that can be imbued in even the most humble pieces of clothing.

Parton performing at The Dominion Theatre in London in 1983.

She also understood that clothes could create a character that would make her voice even stronger. And she used her voice to declare her values, more loudly and more consistently than most other celebrities of her stature. “I’ll do what’s best for me, as everybody should,” she told Allure in response to a 2021 interview question about her approach to aging. She was unconditionally accepting of other people’s choices, aesthetic and otherwise.

Dolly never attended the Met Gala; it’s unknown if she was ever invited to the Costume Institute’s annual benefit. But she certainly grasped far more than most the great impact of a costume. And she was an inspiration to some of the biggest names in fashion, like former Gucci designer Alesandro Michele, whose spring/summer 2019 show included a sleeveless denim jacket with Dolly’s portrait on the back, “Dolly” rendered underneath in the pink lettering of her Smoky Mountains theme park. And like John Galliano in fact, who for his fall 1999 ready-to-wear show played “Jolene” as models walked out in bibbed overall silhouettes and fringed knits. In a 2014 essay for Vogue titled “Why Dolly Parton Doesn't Need Fashion (And Why Fashion Desperately Needs Dolly)”, Rebecca Bengal asked us to “consider lessons from one of fashion’s greatest and most unlikely muses” and wrote of several recent collections that had drawn on “fashion Dollyisms,” among them Chanel, Rodarte, and Prada.

So imagine if this year, the A list arrived on the first Monday in May in sartorial tribute to Dolly Parton. If the red carpet was a celebration of the sheer joy of clothes and a homage to a woman who loved fashion even as she rejected the notion of being fashionable (“I would never stoop so low”). A woman who put her energy and her resources where her mouth is when she said “I’m very real where it counts, and that’s on the inside.” A woman who in her philanthropy made sure she didn’t die a billionaire.

For Allure’s American Beauty issue in 2017, we asked celebrities to define “American beauty.” Dolly Parton’s response: “A true American beauty is a person who loves everybody regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. In today’s crazy world, we need more love and less hate. If everyone respects one another, the world would be a much better place.” Imagine if, in this moment, one of the most visible cultural events of the year celebrated that.

Read more about Dolly Parton and her beauty legacy:

• Dolly Parton Was a Natural Beauty• Dolly Parton Shares Her Favorite Beauty Looks of All Time• How Dolly Parton Has Remained Authentically Herself