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The Costume Institute’s Spring 2025 Exhibition to Explore the Importance of Sartorial Style to the Formation of BlackIdentities in the Atlantic Diaspora
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style will examine the historical and cultural emergence of the Black Dandy, tracing the figure from 18th-century depictions to modern-day representations Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will co-chair The Met Gala® on May 5, 2025; LeBron James will serve as honorary chair.
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The exhibition and benefit are made possible by LouisVuitton.
Major funding is provided by Instagram, the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, Dr. Precious Moloi-Motsepe and Africa Fashion International, and The Perry Foundation.
Additional support is provided by Condé Nast.
“The Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition will explore-with remarkable scale and breadth-the importance of sartorial style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer.
“Through a diverse range of media, this groundbreaking presentation will also celebrate the power of style as a democratic tool for rejecting stereotypes and accessing new possibilities.”
Monica L. Miller, Guest Curator, added: “Fashion and dress have been used in a contest of power and aesthetics for Black people from the time of enslavement to the present, and dandyism has long served as a vehicle through which one can manipulate the relationship between clothing, identity, and power. The history of Black dandyism illustrates how Black people have transformed from being enslaved and stylized as luxury items, acquired like any other signifier of wealth and status, to autonomous, self-fashioning individuals who are global trendsetters. This exhibition will explore concepts that define Black dandyism specifically and uncover elements of productive tension that appear when considering the figure-such as ownership, authority and self-possession, ease, exaggeration, freedom, transgression, dissonance, and spectacularity. It will also highlight the aesthetic playfulness that the dandy engenders and the ways in which sartorial experimentation gestures at both assimilation and distinction-all while telling a story about self and society.”
Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge, The Costume Institute, commented: “Over the last few years, menswear has undergone somewhat of a Renaissance. At the vanguard of this revitalization is a group of extremely talented Black designers who are constantly challenging normative categories of identity. While their styles are both singular and distinctive, what unites them is a reliance on various tropes that are rooted in the tradition of dandyism, and specifically Black dandyism. It was this observation that led me to research the Black dandy’s origins and, ultimately, to Monica’s pioneering work on the subject. In her role as guest curator, Monica visualizes the history of Black dandyism through a wide range of objects and invites us to explore the figure of the Black dandy as much as an idea as an identity.”
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a dandy is defined as “one who studies above everything to dress elegantly and fashionably.” Dandyism was initially imposed on Black men in 18th-century Europe as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of ostentatious consumerism created a trend in fashionably dressed or dandified servants. Both free and enslaved Black people quickly came to understand the power of clothing and style in signaling hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Over time, dandyism afforded these men and women, and later Black Americans and Black-Europeans, an opportunity to employ not only clothing but also gesture, irony, and wit to transform their given identities and posit new ways of embodying political and social possibilities in the Black Atlantic world.
Through the stories of stylish Black individuals across art, literature, music, and society, the exhibition will be organized around a series of characteristics that portray Black dandyism as an evolving sartorial mode—a group of concepts that describe a Black dandy but are not definitive.
These characteristics-such as ownership, presence, ease, and cosmopolitanism—will also tell the Black dandy’s story over time. Representations of Black dandyism as both an aesthetic and a political construct will be exemplified through a range of media, such as garments and accessories, drawings and prints, and paintings, photographs, film excerpts, and more. These representations will explore the importance of sartorial style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora. Taken together, these narratives offer a history and description of Black dandyism as a discrete phenomenon that reflects broader issues of power and race relations in the Black diaspora.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style will feature historical garments and accessories as well as contemporary garments by designers working in both the United States and Europe. The exhibition will also present drawings and prints, decorative arts, ephemera, paintings, photographs, and film excerpts by individuals whose work has been instrumental to the formation and understanding of Black identities and experiences from the 18th century to today.
