Met’s Costume Institute to Examine Black Dandyism in Spring 2025 Show

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute will turn its focus to the intersection of race, fashion, and identity with its spring 2025 exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”

The exhibition, whose theme will be shared by this year’s Met Gala, is the museum’s largest annual fundraising event. This time around, it will explore Black dandyism, a movement in which Black men adopted traditional European fashion, then tailored it to their own means as a form of resistance. The sow will open on May 10, 2025, and run through October 26, 2025.

According to curator Andrew Bolton, the museum is looking at how Black individuals used clothes to affirm identity, drawing from the work of researcher Monica L. Miller, whose 2009 book Slaves to Fashion Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity charted how Black men adopted colonial styles. Miller argued that the trend was an act of “sartorial revenge,” one that their critiqued European oppressors instead of acting as a form of assimilation.

The Met show’s organizers, alongside Costume Institute co-chair Anna Wintour, have tapped American and British musicians and athletes as ambassadors of the theme and the gala’s co-chairs. Among them are ASAP Rocky, LeBron James, Pharrell Williams, and Lewis Hamilton. Williams took up the role at Louis Vuitton’s creative director in 2023. Hamilton, a UK-based professional race car driver, started working as a collaborator with Louis Vuitton in 2020.

The exhibition marks a shift for the Met, whose Costume Institute has never before staged a show explicitly centered around race. It has also been 20 years since the museum last devoted an annual theme to menswear.

“Superfine” is part of the Costume Institute’s broader initiative to address a historical chasm in its collections. White designers far outnumber Black ones in the institute’s holdings.

The exhibition’s subject matter also responds to wider research and discussions led by Black academics on contemporary fashion and race in recent years. The 2021 photo book Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style showed how, beginning in the 1950s, Black countercultural figures began dressing in the styles most associated with elite—and predominately white—institutions. In 2020, Kimberley Jenkins, a fashion history professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, expanded the Fashion and Race Database, an online resource focused on fashion’s connection to race history.