On the first Monday of May, fixtures from the worlds of art, fashion, Hollywood, sports and so on, will once again descend on The Metropolitan Museum steps for The Met Gala. Ahead of the festivities, the Costume Institute announced on Wednesday its spring 2025 exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, a simultaneous examination of the Black dandy, a historical and cultural figure defined as “one who studies above everything to dress elegantly and fashionably,” from 18th-century Enlightenment Europe to today.
“Over the last few years, menswear has undergone somewhat of a renaissance,” Andrew Bolton, curator in charge at The Met’s Costume Institute, said in a press release announcing the exhibition. “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.”
Based on guest curator and professor Monica L. Miller’s book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, the theme is the first in 22 years to focus on menswear (2003’s Bravehearts: Men in Skirts was the last time men’s fashion was at the forefront of the annual event) and the first to feature a guest curator under Bolton’s tenure. It is also the first to turn the Institute’s focus squarely and specifically on Black identity. A$AP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, and Pharrell Williams will join Anna Wintour as cochairs of the gala that opens the show and that serves as a fundraiser for the Institute. LeBron James will be the honorary chair. An illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition with new photography by Tyler Mitchell.
For Miller, the shift from academic research and writing to curation offered a compelling challenge as this subject of Black diaspora inherently includes gaps in tangible objects: “Where the garments do not exist, to think about how we were going to fill in that history,” Miller told Vanity Fair on Wednesday. “We’ve turned to paintings, we’ve turned to prints, drawings, decorative arts, photography, film.”
The exhibition, on view May 10 through October 26, 2025, also arrives at a moment when few women creative directors, let alone Black women, wield power in the fashion industry. As Superfine homes in on Black men and masculinity for its survey, this can be an entry point with room for further considerations. Dandyism among women and across gender presentations has its own rich history, even beyond Western cosmopolitans: Look to Congo where sapeurs, dandies that include women, take on the styling tradition, reversing gendered power dynamics.
“In the last five to seven years, people who design menswear are really experimenting and taking a lot of risks, especially when it comes to gender,” Miller said. “I feel there are a lot of menswear designers who are actually designing for people. Not necessarily men or women. And that is real inspiration here. Partly because the dandy as a historical figure also is, in terms of the excessive attention to dress, also seen sometimes as a feminized figure.”
“Thinking about the way that clothing and dress really allow people to explore different aspects of their identity, as well as, especially in a Black tradition, we know what it means to cross those boundaries sometimes of race or gender, class, sexuality. It feels really great to be bringing that to a 3D forum where people can come into an exhibition and actually see aspects of what they know or of what they’ve also been noticing, actualized in the museum.”
Of the pieces from The Met’s collection, Miller points out a gold-trimmed purple livery from 1946, displayed during the Institute’s preview. “It is profound to actually work with garments that were worn by enslaved people. The clothes are magnificent. They’re beautiful. They’re also a part of a violent history. It’s not just about contemporary fashion and play with this or that, but that we’re actually trying to tell a story that includes and in some ways begins with that moment, with that piece.”
“People are going to want to see connections across concepts, they’re being, in some ways, asked to connect across concepts. As people move through the exhibition, we’re hoping that they’ll be able to take in the hard history, but also see moments of transcendence.”
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