Inside The Met’s New ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ Exhibition

What does loads of years of Black dandy taste appear to be? If you ask The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has made Superfine: Tailoring Black Style its spring 2025 Costume Institute exhibition, the glance soars throughout notions of favor, making its approach into politics, race, social dynamics, gender, sexuality, and sophistication. But all of it leads again to style and self-presentation as a device for resistance and difference. “A dandy is defined as someone who ‘studies above everything else to dress elegantly and fashionably,’” because it reads at the wall that opens the exhibition.

The display—The Costume Institute’s 2d in its historical past faithful only to menswear—is separated into 12 sections, starting from Presence to Heritage and Cosmopolitanism. There are spaces devoted to the lives and appears of literary figures like Alexandre Dumas, plus the wardrobes of icons together with Grace Jones, Prince, Josephine Baker, and André Leon Talley. According to Andrew Bolton, curator in control of The Costume Institute, the latter was once the foundation for the exhibition idea.

To kick off the preview at the morning of Monday, May 5, Colman Domingo—who’s a Met Gala co-chair this 12 months, in conjunction with Pharrell Williams and Zendaya—gave a speech about private taste and the boys who’ve influenced his aesthetic, bringing up his father and different members of the family as inspiration. “It’s extraordinary,” he mentioned of the display. “I think it’s going to be very impactful, and potent, and surprisingly, very emotional.”

While one specifically breathtaking Grace Wales Bonner velvet go well with trimmed in pearls with an identical headpiece glittered, different showcases equipped deep dives into historical past, like one segment that recounted the true historical past of “cross-dressing for freedom,” or one who held up W. E. B. Du Bois,—the sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist who was once the primary Black guy to earn a Ph.D from Harvard—as a method icon. Du Bois, it sort of feels, had a penchant for one of the most maximum remarkable tailors of his time, which ended in him turning into one of the vital best-dressed males in early 1900s America. Artwork from the likes of Iké Udé, a dandy himself, added an explosion of character right through the display.

“Each section of the exhibition relates and juxtaposes a historical object with the exquisite work of contemporary Black designers,” Monica Miller, visitor curator, and writer of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, informed press all the way through the preview. “We’ve created connections about the history of Black representation—resiliency in ownership, for example. Like garments from the 19th century done in gold and silver, designed to transform.”

The cavernous area was once decked out in Virgil Abloh-era Louis Vuitton (the logo is a sponsor of the exhibition). There have been additionally a slew of fan-favorite rising designers featured, together with Martine Rose, Willy Chavarria, and Luar. Miller pointed to a blouse on show that was once worn through Prince all the way through his Purple Rain years, “when he exploded onto the music scene and changed both music and fashion forever,” she mentioned. Accessories have been in every single place within the display—together with a Balmain gold belt formed like a couple of arms clasping a blooming bouquet of flora, impressed through the paintings of Ghanaian photographer Prince Gyasi. Perhaps essentially the most transferring a part of the display was once the imagery of actual folks, all who represented their very own instance of dandyism in a technique or any other. There was once even {a photograph} of “Uncle” Lionel Batiste, a mythical New Orleans musician and character who wore what he known as a “birthday suit”: a adapted jacket lined in greenback expenses. According to the accompanying textual content at the wall, the glance is a convention within the area.