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The Met Gala theme will celebrate Black dandyism, style and tailoring

Written by Site Adminstrator on . Posted in Blog.

The Met Gala theme will celebrate Black dandyism, style and tailoring

The Met Gala is an opulent night out for celebrities, fashion icons and other luminaries to mark the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute spring exhibition, and it’s become a spectacle for the rest of us to gawk at and (recently) criticize.

In 2023, there was some hubbub over the theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” since the designer was known for making fatphobic, racist, misogynistic and Islamophobic comments, according to Time.

Last year, the event’s theme, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” was a commentary on humanity’s fragility, the passing of time and the ephemerality of wealth, which seemed to be lost on many of the attendees, including a TikToker who went viral (in the bad way) for lip synching to “Let them eat cake” in a Marie Antoinette-inspired getup.

This year, the Met seems to be going in another direction entirely, highlighting Black style in menswear over the centuries. The new theme is based on the upcoming 2025 spring exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” 

The production is apparently inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, and it will examine the “Black dandy,” and how this figure developed in Enlightenment Europe during the 18th century as well as a look at 21st-century incarnations in London, New York and Paris.

Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will co-chair The Met Gala, which is set for May 5. LeBron James will serve as honorary chair. Renowned chef and (five-star) Tatiana owner Kwame Onwuachi will feed guests and artist Cy Gain will serve as the creative director alongside Derek McLane and Raúl Àvila.

In addition to entertaining the public at large, the Gala also serves as the Costume Institute’s primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, operations and capital improvements.

According to the Associated Press, this is the Met’s first fashion exhibit in over 20 years to focus on menswear, which explains the almost all-male slate of hosts.

“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,” said Guest Curator Monica L. Miller in an official statement. “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,” she continued. “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.”

The Internet has, of course, already started talking about this all, specifically discussing the importance of getting the theme, and its execution, right.

* This article was originally published here