“God Created Black People and Black People Created Style”—Inside The Met’s Press Preview for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”

The excitement building around “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute looking at the history of Black style through the lens of dandyism, has been undeniable. (It has already raised $31 million, a new record for the museum.) Not least of all at this morning’s press preview, where a standing-room-only crowd assembled to hear remarks from the Met’s CEO Max Hollein, gala co-host Colman Domingo, and co-curators Andrew Bolton and Monica L. Miller.

“Superfine” is inspired by Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, which Bolton came across following the passing of André Leon Talley in 2022, an event that he also credits as being “the catalyst for the show.”

Chef Kwame Onwuachi, Monica L. Miller, Andrew Bolton, Colman Domingo, and Max Hollein.

Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images

Along with Talley, in his remarks Bolton mentioned other “ancestor figures” that informed the exhibition, including W.E.B Dubois, Frederick Douglass, and Virgil Abloh, the founder of Off-White and creative director at Louis Vuitton Men’s until his passing in 2021. “Virgil himself was acutely aware of the figure of the dandy, and it was even in his Vocabulary According to Virgil Abloh,” said Bolton. His definition reads: “An 18th century label for the obsessive male dresser later defined by Charles Baudelaire as the male aspiration to becoming ‘uninterruptedly sublime.’”

Uninterruptedly sublime: “I can’t think of a better phrase not only to describe the Black dandy but also what Monica’s achieved in ‘Superfine,’” Bolton continued. “She offers a vision of the Black male body that is constituted outside limiting identity marks of race, gender, and sexuality. A vision that is defined inclusively—not in terms of opposition—and what transpires is a story of liberation and emancipation through sartorial experimentation. [It is] a story in which fashion, masculinity, and Blackness converge in expressions of self-creation and self-intention, self-possession and self-determination, self-annunciation and self-actualization. For Virgil, the Black dandy is part of what he called the ‘Black Imagination’ the way of manifesting Black dreams in real life, and in the exhibition Monica explores how these dreams are realized and made tangible, and in so doing she highlights the liberated concept of the imagination itself.”

Miller began her own remarks by quoting a passage from Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, where the title character looks down a subway platform and notices three young men wearing Zoot suits which ends with one of them being described as one of those African sculptures distorted in the interest of a design. Well what design and whose? “What Ellison is describing here is an Invisible Man’s query into men who are full of presence,” she explained. “He sees their dandyism, the synergy between their clothing, individuality and collectivity. He recognizes their dandyism as a practice of distinction, of association, and provocation. He sees the future in them.” She continued, “Dandyism is by definition an act of refusal to fit into, or even accept given or typical categories of identity.” Miller explained the exhibition is broken down into 12 categories, what they each represent, and some of the special garments and items contained within.