The Met’s Next Fashion Blockbuster Takes On the Politics of Race

With support from LeBron James, ASAP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and more.

The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is wading into the politics of race relations.

On Wednesday, the museum announced that its spring 2025 blockbuster fashion show will be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” focusing on the history of the Black dandy and the way peacocking goes beyond aesthetics to empowerment. ASAP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will be co-chairs of the gala that opens the show; LeBron James will be the honorary chair.

The Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear, the show is another step in the Costume Institute’s efforts to rectify its own historic failures in diversity and inclusion, said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge.

“I wanted to stage a show on race that could use our collection to tell a story that had been absent from the conversation both within the museum and outside,” Mr. Bolton said. “This is a first of its kind.”

The goal, he said, is to demonstrate what happens to the concept of the “dandy,” as defined by Beau Brummell in Regency England, when it is racialized. When, for example, an enslaved person is treated as a luxury object to be dressed up and displayed — and how those clothes in turn were appropriated by the enslaved and used to subvert existing systems and create new identities. Additionally, it will illustrate how contemporary Black men’s wear designers use their work to connect to this tradition.

The show’s title takes its name from a memoir by an 18th-century enslaved man who was able to buy his liberty and who was writing about what he planned to wear to celebrate: “a suit of superfine clothes.” Essentially, in your face with my outfit!

Mr. Bolton said he had been thinking about how such a show might look since 2021, ultimately settling on the 2009 book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity” by Monica L. Miller, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College, as a template. Ms. Miller is the guest curator of the show. The Costume Institute has never had a Black curator (a situation Mr. Bolton intends to rectify).

“I was flabbergasted,” Ms. Miller said when Mr. Bolton called her.

Mr. Bolton has been working to diversify the Met’s fashion holdings since the summer of 2020, when the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests led institutions to examine their own failures of inclusion. At that time, when the spring blockbuster “About Time,” which celebrated the museum’s 150th anniversary, was postponed because of the Covid-19 outbreak, Mr. Bolton re-curated the show to include more designers of color.

Subsequently he used “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” to acquire more pieces from young BIPOC designers, and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” to spotlight previously overlooked designers like Ann Lowe (whose work had been in the Met’s holdings for years without being seen) and Fannie Criss.

“I mean, you can’t get there if you don’t try,” Ms. Miller said. Creating “Superfine” has been, she said, “an opportunity for everyone on the curatorial team to really understand how many Black designers, historically and contemporarily, are out there.”

“Superfine” follows other recent museum shows, including “Africa’s Fashion Diaspora,” currently at the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (and following last year’s “Fresh, Fly, Fabulous: 50 Years of Hip Hop Style” at the same institution), and “Africa Fashion” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2023, in examining the importance of Black fashion.

“They all have a real underlying intellectual and sometimes political line in them,” Ms. Miller said. But with this show, she said, “we’re going to lead with it. It is really a lot about power.”

The show is about not just fashion, she said, but a Black ability, born out of necessity, “to take what you’re given and transform it to be something that’s much more livable, much more to your advantage, much more about who you are and who you want to be.

“That is about survival, right?” she continued. “But it’s also about transcendence. It’s about ambition. It’s about the future.”

The show, involving 12 different themes, including “ownership,” “caricature” and “cosmopolitanism,” will concentrate on the Black dandy in Britain and the United States from the 18th century through today (though there are nods to the history of African dandies). It will juxtapose historic garments with the work of modern designers like Grace Wales Bonner, Virgil Abloh, Olivier Rousteing, and Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter of Botter, as well as paintings, videos and documents.

A purple velvet livery trimmed in gold worn by an enslaved servant in Maryland, which, Ms. Miller said, “is beautiful but also very violent,” will be displayed next to a velvet suit by Ms. Wales Bonner trimmed in gold and cowrie shells, a signifier of African currency as well as heritage. A suit from Labrum London designed by Foday Dumbuya and printed with immigration documents will be set against a collection of W.E.B. Du Bois’s passports. In total, about 30 designers will be represented in the show, and Mr. Bolton has a wish list of new acquisitions.

Though Mr. Bolton has made a signature of connecting his shows to contemporary issues and has flirted with hot-button topics, most notably in “China: Through the Looking Glass” and “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” he acknowledged that taking on racialized dandyism may be seen as controversial, especially in the wake of an election that has centered on issues of immigration and race-baiting.

“This is what in Black studies we call ‘hard histories,’” Ms. Miller said. But it also explores “real moments of joy,” she added.

The show space, which will open May 10 (the gala will take place on May 5), will be designed by the artist Torkwase Dyson, with bespoke mannequin heads created by Tanda Francis, who is known for her sculptures of monumental African heads and masks. Iké Udé, a multimedia artist who Mr. Bolton said embodied the essence of the contemporary dandy, is a special consultant, and Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover, is photographing the catalog.

The primary sponsor is Louis Vuitton (Mr. Williams is Vuitton’s men’s wear designer), and other sponsors include Instagram, Precious Moloi-Motsepe and Africa Fashion International and Tyler Perry. The menu for the gala dinner will be created by Kwame Onwuachi, the Nigerian American chef and author. The dress code for the evening is still a secret. Still, you can expect that everyone will look … well, superfine.

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape.

• Thomas Schütte’s MoMA Moment: The German artist expects blowback when a retrospective of his work opens. Maybe he even enjoys that prospect.
• A Stirring Tribute to Alvin Ailey: Music’s in the air, and there’s painting and sculpture in imaginative variety as the Whitney Museum gives rare treatment to the choreographer and performer.
• Doug Wheeler’s Celestial Wonder: What the visionary artist achieves with paint, plastic and flashbulbs at David Zwirner in Chelsea is astounding in its effect.
• How Liza Lou ‘Messes With Your Mind’: In her new bead installation at the Brooklyn Museum, the artist’s canvas ranges from a 35-foot-long mobile home to the chauvinist history of Abstract Expressionism.
• Looking for More Art?: Here are the gallery shows not to miss in October.