In the glare of camera flashes on the first Monday in May, it’s easy to forget that the Met Gala isn’t just an expensive-looking celebrity parade – it’s also the opening celebration for a museum show.
This year, the party will inaugurate “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style", an exhibition put on by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute that traces the influence of the Black dandy over 300 years.
The exhibition investigates how dandyism, a style of elevated dress once imposed upon enslaved people, was remade by Black aesthetes into a tool of social mobility and self-definition.
It might take the form of a tweedy three-piece suit, a disco-fabulous stage costume or a slouchy leather jacket printed with luxury logos.
Those pieces and more than 200 others in the exhibition illustrate how Black dandies have wielded their clothing as instruments of both flair and function.
Read more: 'From Savile Row to track suits': What to expect at this year's Met Gala
“Dandyism is a practice that’s not just about clothing, dress, accessories,” said Monica L Miller, the guest curator of the exhibition and a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College.
“It’s often about the strategic use of those things in particular political moments, around particular cultural nodes.”
Miller, whose 2009 book, Slaves To Fashion: Black Dandyism And The Styling Of Black Diasporic Identity, inspired the exhibition, scoured historical societies, museums and private collections to find pieces that located Black dandyism at turning points in history. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
A first look at the Black dandy exhibition
Monica Miller in a back room of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. She offers a sneak peek at the fashion exhibition exploring the influence of the Black dandy. Photo: The New York Times
A striped navy twill ensemble that is a prime example of the zoot suit, a style that gained popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s featuring sharp shoulders, a long jacket (no back vent), grand lapels and pant legs that ballooned to their cuffs. Photo: The New York Times
A example of a plum-coloured velvet jacket and its matching waistcoat, which in the past were worn by an enslaved man in Maryland in the 1840s, but they were modelled on European fashion from about a century earlier. Photo: The New York Times
Louis Vuitton luggage owned by fashion editor Andre Leon Talley. Photo: The New York Times
A shimmering jacket embroidered with clear plastic sequins that was worn by the boundary-pushing disco superstar Sylvester. Photo: The New York Times
A leather jacket with a mink collar, made for Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC, is one of the Harlem menswear legend Dapper Dan’s signature “knockups". Photo: The New York Times
A daguerreotype, taken by an unknown photographer around 1855, of abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass, who wore his own clothing when he sat for photographs. Photo: The New York Times
A double-breasted wool suit of rich browns and grays was designed by Jeffrey Banks, who founded his namesake label in 1977 after working for Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. Photo: The New York Times
