Arbiters of Style: Black dandyism and the power of tailoring

RTÉ News​

06-05-2025

Never has a theme for an annual event been so needed for the time we live in than the exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, and the gala that marks its opening.
The biggest night of the year for custom fashion, the Met Gala (or as it is formally known, the Costume Institute Benefit) is a spectacle that raises funds for the arts, specifically for The Met's Costume Institute.
Dedicated to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute (formally named The Anna Wintour Costume Centre), the benefit was first founded by publicist Eleanor Lambert in 1948 after The Museum of Costume Art merged with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946.
When Anna Wintour became chair in 1995, though, the type of invitee significantly changed: to the star-studded event where musicians, actors and other high-profile celebrities are meticulously seated and only earn entry upon invitation.
This year, the theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, is a reminder that creativity, individualism and identity cannot be confined.
Typically, the dress code for the gala is a little broader than the exhibition theme to allow for greater creative expression, with 'tailored for you' echoing the sartorial nature of the exhibition, which, as noted by The Met, presents a cultural and historical examination of Black style over three hundred years through the concept of dandyism.
Guest curator of The Costume Institute's exhibition and author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, Monica L. Miller, notes of the Black dandy in her book: "Once slaves to fashion, they made fashion their slave".
As in the 18th century, a new culture of consumption, fueled by the slave trade, colonialism, and imperialism, enabled access to clothing and goods. Such wares became indicative of wealth, distinction and taste alongside the exploitation of people and their trade.
The exhibition this year will focus on the long textile history of Africa and how, through dress, Black dandyism sprang from the intersection of European and African style traditions. Its origins lie in the late 18th and early 19th Century when Black servants were dressed up as a spectacle - a marker of wealth for the elite.
As menswear became more sober in the early 19th century and into the 20th century, Black dandyism reclaimed its past through creativity. The antithesis to confining Black identity.
At its core, for the dandy, fashion was a vehicle for both self-expression and a subtle form of rebellion against societal norms. For Black dandyism, the stakes were much higher. The Black dandy of the Harlem Renaissance, as one heads into the 1920s and 30s, was someone who used dress to assert themselves in a world that often denied them dignity, using dress to assert their right to exist on their own terms.
Though this exhibition focuses on menswear, there were early women Black Dandies, such as Gladys Bentley. The Harlem Renaissance blues singer in her early career dressed in men's clothes to tread that line between genders, a fluidity provided by Black dandyism.
The openly queer, black entertainer paired her dress with dandy-centric accessories such as a top hat, cane and brooches.
From 1920s Harlem to 1970s disco to 1990s hip-hop (alongside long-established tailors such as Robert Hill from Birmingham, Alabama) and Congolese 'sapeurs,' black dandyism has been kept alive. Flamboyant, extravagant and bespoke, black men have used how they dress to express pride and resistance.
Black dandyism even captured the attention of Irish company Guinness back in 2014, when an ad followed Congolese men (stout in hand) as they shed their working clothes and transformed themselves externally into polished, hat-wearing, cane-wielding style moguls.
Lest we forget the voice of the narrator: "In life, you cannot always choose what you do, but you can always choose who you are.'
In an article by BBC News, costume designer Mr Gammon took 28 suitcases of elegant kit to shoot the Guinness ad with members of the Congolese Society of Ambianceurs and Elegant Persons (SAPE) or 'sapeurs,' as they are known.
The main idea was to be true to the sapeur look, and though heightened a bit, photographer Per-Anders Pettersson, who spent five days with sapeurs in Kinshasa in 2012, said the picture portrayed in the ad was pretty accurate.
Over a decade later and black dandyism is finally getting the global recognition it deserves, not just as a fashion movement but as a state of being. As we look forward to bespoke tailoring, a plethora of takes on the 'suit' and guests' interpretation of the theme, we are reminded of the importance of style and indeed stylists.
With the eyes of the world on it, the importance of style as a result of this year's exhibition also extends to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora, particularly in the United States and Europe. It is the first time that all co-chairs are Black men, too, celebrating Black excellence and the undervalued (but very historically significant) culture of arbiters of style.
A term used to describe the original dandy. It may be the first gala dedicated to menswear in more than two decades (remember Braveheart: Men in Skirts, 2003), but it is so historic to see Black dandyism receiving the global spotlight it has long deserved in its own right.
Its role in Black culture is not just a matter of dress, but an assertion of autonomy, beauty, and power - a resilience that is truly inspiring.