Guest curator Monica L. Miller adapts her landmark book into a room-by-room narrative that opens with 18th-century padlocked collars and ends with Pharrell-era Louis Vuitton.
At Monday’s Met Gala 2025, the Costume Institute will spotlight “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” an exhibition opening May 10 and running through Oct. 26—eight weeks longer than the department’s standard run. It marks the Institute’s first show to address race head-on and its first menswear-centered presentation since 2003’s “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts.”
Guest curator Monica L. Miller based the exhibition on her 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of the Black Diasporic Identity.
Spanning about 250 years, “Superfine” moves from the livery coats forced on enslaved boys to the swagger of today’s streetwear. Visitors travel through twelve sections—Ownership, Presence, Distinction, Disguise, Freedom, Champion, Respectability, Jook, Heritage, Beauty, Cool, Cosmopolitanism—each offering a lens rather than a full stop. A Brooks Brothers livery coat dated 1856-64 stands near W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1925 receipt for two Brooks Brothers suits, framing the conversation between constraint and self-possession.
Black dandyism began in eighteenth-century England, where enslaved servants wore gold, brass, or silver collars padlocked at the neck, walking billboards for an owner’s wealth. Across the Atlantic, people who reached America with little more than memory reworked their Sunday best for church and holidays, asserting style where few freedoms existed.
After Emancipation that impulse expanded. The Harlem Renaissance turned dressing into declaration; fox furs, beaded sheaths, generous trousers, fedora crowns, and two-tone shoes filled uptown ballrooms. The zoot suit, with its broad shoulders and fabric-hungry drape, ignored wartime rationing in favor of visibility, turning cloth into protest.
The twentieth-century closing passages give way to looks by about forty contemporary designers, from Grace Wales Bonner and Ozwald Boateng to Telfar, Botter, and Dapper Dan. Louis Vuitton, the exhibition’s lead sponsor, appears throughout, connecting the tenure of Virgil Abloh to the current vision of Pharrell Williams.
Pieces sit in glass enclosures that rise well above eye line, steering attention upward before pulling it back to the surface of a hand-embroidered lapel. The staging asks the viewer to look harder, and then look again.
Met Gala co-hosts A$AP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton, and Louis Vuitton’s Williams carry the message far beyond the museum steps. With “Superfine” the Costume Institute proposes that dressing has always been argument, performance, and claim—an idea now given its largest room yet.
