The Met Gala’s 2025 theme was confirmed earlier this week. Vanessa Friedman speaks to the curators overseeing an exhibition that aims to rectify past failures.
The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is wading into the politics of race relations.
On Wednesday, the museum announced that the theme
The Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of colour, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on menswear, the show is another step in the Costume Institute’s efforts to rectify its 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,” Bolton said. “This is a first of its kind.”
The goal, he said, was to demonstrate what happened to the concept of the “dandy”, as defined by Beau Brummell in Regency England, when it was racialised. When, for example, an enslaved person was treated as a luxury object to be dressed up and displayed – and how those clothes were appropriated by the enslaved and used to subvert existing systems and create new identities. Additionally, it would illustrate how contemporary Black menswear designers used 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!
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. Miller is the guest curator of the show. The Costume Institute has never had a Black curator (a situation Bolton intends to rectify).
“I was flabbergasted,” Miller said when Bolton called her.
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Advertise with NZME.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 failures of inclusion. The spring blockbuster “About Time”, which celebrated the museum’s 150th anniversary, was postponed because of the Covid-19 outbreak and Bolton recurated the show to include more designers of colour.
Subsequently, he used “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” to acquire more pieces from young BIPOC designers (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) and “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” to spotlight previously overlooked designers such as 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,” Miller said. Creating “Superfine” had 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,” Miller said. But with this show, she said, “we’re going to lead with it. It is really a lot about power.”
The show was 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? 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 since the 18th century (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, Miller said, “is beautiful but also very violent”, will be displayed next to a velvet suit by 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’ passports. In total, about 30 designers will be represented in the show, and Bolton has a wish list of new acquisitions.
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Advertise with NZME.Though 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 racialised dandyism might be seen as controversial, especially in the context of an election that has centred on issues of immigration and race-baiting.
“This is what in Black studies we call ‘hard histories’,” Miller said. But it also explored “real moments of joy”.
The show space which will open on May 10, after the gala on May 5, and will be designed by 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 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 catalogue.
The primary sponsor is Louis Vuitton (Williams is Vuitton’s menswear 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, a 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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vanessa Friedman
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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